Ants & Tunnels
Over coming tunnel phobia, and ants too!
As a few of you may know, I'm quite phobic of tunnels. Lately I've been getting over it, by accident. We go down every Friday to get Andrew from Cerberus, and then drop him back there on Sunday night. For some reason, every trip back so far, I miss the exit for Kingwood and end up going through the damn tunnel.
It's been a combination of the kids distracting me, or radio, or just exhaustion. Each time we have go through the tunnel, then U turn, and go back through the bloody thing. Generally by then I'm just tired and want to get home and feed and bed the kids.
As a consequence, I'm pretty over tunnels! Yay for luck.
As for the ants.. Emma god love her, has been scared of ants for as long as I remember. This week it's come to a head, with her having a toilet accident because she couldn't go to the toilet thanks to ONE ant. I took my standard approach to a child challenge - we CBT'd it. And yes that's cognitive behaviour therapy, NOT cock & ball torture thanks guys :)
We made our list of stages to achieve, and rewards for each stage, but she didn't really want a helpful thought for each stage. Emma's not so much a thinker in a lot of ways.
Her stages were:
Read about ants, learn what they eat and if they hurt us, what their jobs are etc.
Reward: Chocolate from the Cadbury factory.
Look at ants, as close up as she could.
Reward: Plaster painting with me.
Experiment with ants - what they like to eat, where they like living, what they don't like (talcum powder, cinnamon etc)
Reward: Woodwork with me
Squish some ants with her shoes on to see that they are not going to hurt her if she has to walk over them sometimes.
Reward: hmmm not sure cos Emma drew her picture of her reward for this one and I cannot work it out!
Put rubbish in the outside bin that has ants all over it.
Reward: Help bake her birthday cake.
Let at least one ant walk over her toes or hand.
Reward: Present of her choice.
This is the system we used to help Eryn conquer a new food - Lasagne. Eryn took a few weeks to do it, considering Emma's screaming hysteria, I expected the same. One hour, give or take, and it was done.
We read about ants here at just before 3pm, went to get Eryn form school, and found ants on the walk in. I was trying to find an ant nest to show her, so she was wandering in and out picking up rocks, in the middle of all the ants, not a bloody care in the world. I was starting to think I'd been duped by the 5 year old to be honest.
We went through looking, squishing - with AND without shoes, before we even got Eryn. We got Eryn and went straight to the shops where Emma picked out an Ant Farm as her ultimate present.
We came home, she put rubbish in the bin, not a single qualm, quiver or cry. When we go to the point of actually putting her hand or foot in the ant's path her whole little body did actually stiffen up and she freaked, so at least I felt the fear was real instead of a 4 year fake.
She did it though, giggled when it ran across her hand - and she actually did have a helpful thought - 'they're just little slaters'.
So, it's done. We'll practice each day for a little while, but I think she's mostly OK. It did mean I had to assemble the ant farm.. don't do it, ever. I mean ever. It's HARD. And, well, hard! And if you do one, don't catch the ants with the tweezers, you kill them. It asks for 'about 20 ants, workers are preferred”. Well, I'm not so sure if they are workers or not, but after trying to catch 20 ants - which you can't count by the way - and killing half, I got pretty cranky.
I hooked 'em up from jar to farm, and left them. When I got up this morning the other half where dead too. So I gave up and went and caught them by hand. I scooped my hand over the bin, and shook em one at a time into the tiny holes at the top. Let's see if these ones live.
So that's our phobias underway - ants, tunnels, and even hand dish washing for me!