I am not sure if I have mentioned this before but our toddler Little Miss takes after Wife in that she is a little ‘high strung’. Small things can really push her over the edge and lead to a real crying jag - especially if something is spilled.

Another thing that used to freak her out completely was swings. When she was on them she only wanted to go really slowly. Then if some bigger kids got on them and swung normally she would literally have a major freak out and start bawling and screaming.

Well I remember a couple of weeks ago when my father ‘Pa’ was up for the weekend. I dropped him and Little Miss at the park and went to the shops to grab the paper. I came back 30mins later to find Little Miss eating her banana between sobs and ‘Pa’ with a ‘I don’t know what happened but she really freaked out, but it’s not my fault - honest’ look on his face. My poor father, while he is a excellent father and good man he is a bit of a workaholic and so missed a fair chunk of our early years in the 60’s and 70’s establishing his career. This has lead to him being in situations with the grand kids that he probably never found him in with my brother and I.

It is admirable to watch him try really hard to be as involved as possible with his grandkids. My parents live 1100kms away but I don’t think they have gone more that 2 months without seeing them - which is great. But I seem to have got lost on a tangent again and strayed from my point - maybe I should blog about this later, always fun to talk about the 65 year old engineer who finds himself drinking pretend cups of ‘rosy tea’ for hours on end (I didn’t know he had it in him).

Anyhow, my original point was that Little Miss was freaked out by swings and would have a total anxiety attack if anyone went on them.

But now we know why - it took a few weeks of careful questioning to discover it, and I think it is my fault. A couple of months ago we were at the park and we were both on swings. I let my inner child take over and started swinging as high as I could before at the peak of a swing I’d jumped off the seat and fly through the air. All very amusing I thought, and Little Miss did laugh at the time as well.

However it turns out that after thinking about it for a while she had managed to convince herself that it was possible to swing too high and fly off into the sky - just like her blue balloon did one day. This was the cause of the anxiety and freaking out, she was worried the kids swinging high would fly away. After much explaining we managed to convince her that this was indeed not possible and nothing to worry about.

So now she isn’t afraid of swinging and wants to go higher and faster all the time - but this is a double edge sword because now I spend the days I am home pushing her on the swing for hours on end while she giggles the whole time. Maybe I should of just let her be scared….

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