We hear this daily. He's scared of flies. No. He's really scared of flies! Paranoid. The 35 pound toddler is simply petrified. He shakes like a leaf at the mention of a simple house fly, or for that matter anything that even resembles a house fly!
Uh huh... things such as cotton balls ripped up by big brothers and sent floating in the bathtub. And straw wrapper bits being blown around restaurant tables in two year old Noah's general direction.
Don't misunderstand. He's not afraid of much. He gets bulled over in the backyard by his brothers playing tackle football and he giggles. He plays hockey in the driveway - his brothers on roller blades. The big boys make Noah play goalie, a position he gladly and happily fills. Balls fly at him as fast as boys on skates can send them, and he's not phased.
A house fly on the other hand is another matter entirely. It's hysterically funny. It got even funnier the night that I tucked him into his crib and thought I saw something on Mimi. I jumped and pulled the blanket from the crib. As I did so, I said {clearly without thinking}, "Ooh- that looks like a bug the size of China!" Noah scrambled to his feet saying, "Bug-a-size-a-shina!?" I reassured him that there was no bug and that what I thought resembled a large bug was just a newly torn hole in well-loved Mimi.
I won myself a mid-night trip to the babe's room that night! The poor thing was crying, "I scared a shine-a bug! I scared a flies!" I had to shake out all the blankets before putting them all back in his crib. Only after they were all shaken would he lay back down and settle for sleep.
These little passing phases pass so quickly that I cannot remember at all what my other sons feared at this age. I do recall a number of night terrors with our oldest around this age, and our middle son certainly had his list of fears, but like most childhood phases it passed so quickly that I can no longer recall the specifics.
It does seem, however, that the Shine-A-bug, if for no other reason than how hard we've laughed, will be one of those memories that sticks. It may take it's place with other sweet memories like "pean-tut sauce" {Isaiah's words spoken with a lisp when he was small, for peanut butter} and "chewelve" {the way Elijah still pronounces the number twelve and the way Noah stands, two fingers in his mouth and his other pointer finger stuck in his belly button. If his shirt's in the way, we hear "can't find ya button!"
For now, in the midst of this fun (for us) phase, we will keep tickling him every time we speak of flies. It seems a good and fun distraction, and surely he'll learn one of these days that flies are harmless, and there's no such thing as a "shine-a bug".
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