Shake-a Shake-a Boom

We have developed a little problem around here that I can't quite shake (please note there is a pun there, and you will get it in a moment).  It has started to hinder our lives a bit, and really hinder my ability to sleep.  Neither of which is good.  The Big One has developed a serious fear of earth quakes.
Having never been in a real one, I'm scared of them too, but the vast majority of time,it never enters my mind.  Her problem is that it is always on her mind.
I think the recent quake in VA set it off.  I had started using the news as a tactic to keep the kids from watching TV with me.  IT stopped working at some point in time, and The Big One came in and watched a lot of the quake coverage on TV.  IT wasn't a bad one, but because it was so uncommon in that part of the US, it got a ton of coverage.  Hence it seems much bigger than what it was.
Now, she is absolutely, completely, terrified of them, and sure that one will strike at any moment.
Saturday night, she was supposed to spend the night with a friend.  This is a friend she has had since Kindergarten, and it was the first time they had spent the night together, just the two of them with out their Girl Scout troop, or any other friends.  They were ridiculously excited.
Then, about 11pm that night, I got a phone call.  The Big One was in tears and wouldn't calm down.  She wanted to come home.  After I went to get her, we started talking about what scared her.  Her Friend had fallen asleep, and The Big One was left laying in the little girl's room, thinking about things.  The girl has bunk beds, and The Big One was terrified that there would be an earthquake, and the top portion of the bed would fall down on her and crush her.  I suppose a valid concern in some regard, but I would venture that the beds were well constructed enough to handle all the torture and extreme stress brought on by younger children, and they would probably survive the kind of small quakes we get frequently around here.  Regardless, she wasn't about to be there any longer, and I had to get her.
I'm really surprised by this sudden onset of earthquake fear.  While she wasn't born here, The Big One has been raised in CA pretty much most of her life.  We moved here when she was 15 months old.  I had always thought that kids who were raised here would develop some sort of environmental immunity to the fear of earthquakes.  They happen so much, that they should be routine.  I may have miscalculated that.  The Big Little One hasn't gotten scared.  Perhaps you need an actual CA birth certificate to get that immunity.  I'm not sure.  Maybe there is an earthquake immunity booster shot of some sort that I can give her.
I realize that a little bit of fear is actually healthy.  We need to be aware that quakes are real, and serious, and respect that their potential power enough to always be cautious, but there is a line you have to draw in being scared.  Too much fear is a bad thing.  I'm really just hoping this will pass and she will get back to her normal self soon.  I don't want any of us to miss out on life because of fear.

Oh my. What have I started?

My husband is currently deployed. We are making it work.

As I was doing laundry the other day, I came across one of his dirty shirts that had ended up in the clean pile. No idea how that happened. Well, actually, if I were to guess, I would say that the little one, in her zeal to "help" me, carried dirty clothes from the laundry room to the clean clothes I was folding on the couch.

Anyway, I smelled it, and it smells like my husband. Ohh. I love that smell, too.

So, I call the little one over, and tell her to smell the shirt. First of all, she doesn't know how to intake air and make the loud sniffing sound. So, she smells, then blows air our of her nose really hard, just to make the noise. Cute.

"Who does this smell like?"

"Daddy-go!!" As an aside, yes, she does actually call my husband Daddy-go. I think it is because anytime we were out shopping, my husband would wonder off, and I would have to ask over and over again, "Where did your Daddy go?". It just stuck that way.

So, she is very excited to smell Daddy.

I call the big one in, and have her smell. At first, she looks at me like I am crazy for telling her to sniff a shirt. Then, she does it, and yells "Daddy!!". They loved it.

Well, Ava took it a little further. She has decided that she needs to sniff everything coming and going. At first, she was sniffing all the clothes, the clean ones, of course, that have no scent besides detergent and fabric softener.

She grabs every one's clothes, names the owner, does the sniff, then blow out, and says "Ahhh".

For example, she grabbed one of Lilly's shirts.
"Lilly shirt." She said.
Sniff. Deep force full air blown out the nose for sound effect.
"Ahhhhh."

Again, cute. We go through momma clothes, Ava clothes, anything she could grab. I did, however, draw the line at my clean panties. That just isn't right.

From the clean clothes, she has started to sniff any clothing she could grabbed. She sniff and "ahhh"ed Lilly's dirty pajama top as soon as Lilly took it off yesterday.

Now, she is sniffing just plain old anything. This morning, it was the stairs. Yes. Our stairs. Which, by the way, I can't imagine smell good. I may vacuum them, but I haven't cleaned them since we moved in. Yuck.
"Stairs."
Sniff. Deep force full air blown out the nose for sound effect.
"Ahhhhh."

No really, she did. What can you do. As long as she isn't sniffing anything too harmful, we will mostly go with the flow, and try, very gently, to direct it's path to things that are better to sniff than others. I imagine this will pass soon. I mean, how long would someone be willing to sniff dirty stairs? That has to be a phase that they grow out of. At least I hope so. In the mean time, we will continue to keep all the school glue put safely away. = )