afraid

For the first time today, I watched Jonathan deal with fear. I'm not really sure what cognitive development leads a baby to suddenly see familiar things in a new, scary, light. But I can't think of anything that precipitated it.

We were playing on the dining room floor with his truck and he kept going over to the baby gate and saying "ball". It took me a while, but I finally figured out he was talking about my big purple exercise ball was in the middle of the floor of the sunroom. I climbed over the gate and brought the ball into the living room because I thought it might be fun for him to play with such a big ball. He approached it at first, but then came diving back towards me, crying and burying his head. He wouldn't touch it, go near, or let go of me and and didn't stop crying until I put it back away. As soon as it was gone he was back to his normal spunky self. And not 10 minutes later he decided he should try to scale the stairs. So much for well grounded fears...