My memories of spending my early childhood in such poverty that one year my only Christmas present from my mother was a (beautiful) handmade rag doll must be entirely false, clearly! Otherwise why would the sound of something scratching on cloth have sounded as an unsettling to my young ears as an ambulance siren?

I must actually have been a spoiled rich kid with no friends. Brilliant! Thanks so much. Now I just have to track down my real, emotionally neglectful rich family, and figure out who altered my memories to make me think I’d been raised by a loving and attentive woman who worked her way through an evil divorce and crushing poverty to become a brilliant English professor instead.

We used to call her “LBA” for “Little Bad Ass” , sinc eit seemed like bad parenting to call her Little Bad Ass all the time.

They never grow out of SI, but it does improve - I promise- as they get better with reading their own cues.

Love ya,
Bic

He will also yell and cry and glare daggers at you and even every once in a great while go so far as to come up and smack you if you try to sing along with his favorite songs. Seriously.

(He’s not generally a hitter. I think he’s hit someone maybe less than 20 times in his life– which is a pretty excellent record for an almost-two-year-old!– but probably half those times were times when someone started singing along with his music and wouldn’t stop).

(And no, it’s not ’cause I’m a terrible singer, LOL. He actualy likes it quite a bit when I sing songs to him acapella. He just can’t stand it when I sing along with his CDs).

He’s really freaked out by a lot of other noises, though. Positively terrified of vaccuum cleaners, loud blenders, electric screwdrivers, or any similar loud high-pitched whirring noise. His whole body goes rigid like someone just shocked him with an electric current when he hears one of his “scary” noises, and he often cries– pitiful, terrified crying, not the fake toddler tantrum kind– for half an hour straight even after you’ve turned the offending appliance off.

Needless to say, we don’t get to vaccum as much as we would like around here . . .

I sure would think this kid was weird if he didn’t remind me SO much of myself when I was little . . . I was, after all, that kid who flat out refused to wear wool, polyester or corduroy because they “sounded funny,” when I moved, and who spent 30 minutes adjusting my sock seams and futzing with the tag at the back of my shirt before I could leave the house . . . Heck, compared to me, Isaac is positively angelic.

Here’s hoping our early-intervention SI therapy keeps him that way.