21 Months, 4 weeks, and scared of spiders?

Rather sensible, if you ask me.

OK, so, the actual point the Experts™ were making this week was about the ‘sudden’ development of fear. “If your formerly fearless child is suddenly terrified of tiny spiders, for example, the fear may have arisen from an actual incident. A spider may have swung down from the ceiling and landed on his arm — an image that may linger in his increasingly complex mind for weeks.”

Well, geez. That would linger in my increasingly less complex mind for months. I’d probably talk about it at parties for years. “There was this one time? This little spider? I swear, I’m not making this up: it came down from the ceiling? And landed ON MY ARM. It was like, the size of A PERIOD! Or maybe…a SEMICOLON!!!”

Then I’d stand there and wait (in vain) for appropriate expressions of shock and horror from the assembly.

What’s worse, I’d probably do it more than once at the same party.

This is a symptom of the devolving brain, which would the opposite of what my kids’ brains are doing, which is why I’m in Big Huge Trouble as time marches on. Their brains are getting bigger, while mine is shrinking down to a size that can’t hold two thoughts at once. Say…that I’ve set my keys down on the dining room table and that the van is blocking the driveway such that my husband won’t be able to park when he gets home. I can remember one fact, or the other. Not both. So I’m either stomping around searching for the keys, or sitting there with the keys in my pocket forgetting why I needed them. Until, right about the time daddy is pulling into the court, one of the kids says, “Mommy, didn’t you need to move the van…?”

Because their brains are more complex than mine, and they can remember what their mother was shouting half an hour ago when she was tearing the house apart looking for the keys.

That they wait to remind me until their father has made the quarter mile hike from the closest street parking and it turning his own key in the door is nothing but pure malice. Kind of not unlike this one time? When this spider…?