The elephant in the room

When we lived in Tacoma, Cailan and I went to Kindermusik class and he loved it, especially all the different instruments he got to play. We had planned on taking him to Kindermusik in Grand Junction, but there are not many classes offered and the one class that was at a time that worked well for us got cancelled because not enough kids signed up for it. So yesterday morning, Chris took Cailan to a similar-sounding class called “Music and Movement” at the local recreation center. It wasn’t really like Kindermusik at all; there were no instruments for the kids to play and not really any singing. It was mostly listening to songs from a CD and dancing or bouncing balls or balancing bean bags on your head (I really should have had Chris write this instead of me; since I wasn’t there I’m sure that I’ve got some of the details wrong).

Cailan was having a great time running around and dancing and following the teacher’s movements. Then a song came on with animal sounds and Cailan came and stood by Chris, his lips trembling and his face crumpling into tears. The elephant sound on the recording brought him to outright wailing. Eventually the teacher stopped that song and moved on to the next one, but Cailan was already very upset. He couldn’t talk about anything else for the next 2 hours:

“What sound scared me? What number on the CD had the elephant sound? What song scared me? I don’t want to listen to any elephants on the TV. What sound scared me? There aren’t any noisy elephants. What song had the elephant sound?” And on and on and on.

Poor kid. When he is scared or worried about something, he has such a hard time letting go of it. It's hard for us, also, to know how to respond when he gets so anxious.