And the fear begins.

Dash has been such an easygoing, take-it-in-stride little guy, but I knew this was coming. He has rarely expressed fear, at least not strongly. One episode I can think of is when Tina, Kelly's puppy, rushed up and licked his face; he was upset and mildly afraid. (But that's just what puppies do. We need to give him more time with Tina to acclimate him better!)

So, yesterday evening, we went outside to play on our playset (what else? Yay!) and it had an interesting selection of springtime bugs on it. Ants, inchworms, caterpillars, some kind of beetle. Rosie is afraid of everything, so I was trying to empower her to use a stick to knock ants off the slide instead of me coming over every 30 seconds to remove bugs.

Dash was watching Rosie, like usual, and pointing out "bug" and a new word, "worm" for caterpillar. I was showing him a small caterpillar on the canopy over the slide (above his head), and then saw that he was scooting away from the slide, toward me. I asked, "Don't you want to slide, honey?" no answer, more scooting. Then I asked, "Are you scared of the worm?" and it was like I set off a siren. Bloodcurdling SCREAMING! Dash was rigid, practically jumped into my arms and gripped me with his entire body for dear life.

It was sweet later; he was telling AJS "worm" with big eyes. We called Auntie M. and he told her "worm" with the most serious expression (um, that's all he would say into the phone, so it was pretty hilarious!).