Fear of Storms

We had a thunderstorm roll through our area this afternoon. Zee heard the thunder and would say, "Oh! What's that?" When she realized that it was a storm, she kept telling me all about how the lights when out "yesterday". (You need to understand that to Zee anything in the past happened either "yesterday" or "two weeks ago". Most recently she has begun saying things happened "last year". Young children's concept of time is so interesting.) At least today she did not run through the house screaming and saying "I'm scared" each time she heard the thunder.

Jay walked the two blocks home from school just as the rain started. Once he was inside he came to me, just about in tears, and asked if I had seen anything on the news about tornadoes. I assured him that we were not expecting a tornado out of this storm, just rain. He was relieved, but not totally at ease. He then went to his room to begin his homework. A short time later he came and asked if I wanted the dogs brought inside. About 10 minutes later he came to me and said the lights in the bathroom and his room kept flickering and he thought we were going to lose power. Thankfully Sissy napped through it all.

We lost power about 2 weeks ago (Yes, actually 2 weeks, not Zee's 2 weeks) when we had some pretty strong thunderstorms in our area. I believe that a transformer was struck by lightning. About 500 residences and businesses were without power for about 3 hours. During that outage the kids kept talking about the storm that we had had last summer that left us without power for 5 days. Luckily we have family close by, so we were able to stay with them.

I cannot believe how scared my kids are of thunderstorms. I have never made a big deal about or shown any fear of storms. Living in the Midwest we are prone to lots of thunderstorms and occasional tornadoes. Right now were are dealing with flooding as well. I bet that as soon as Jay sees that on TV he'll be worried about our house getting flooded. We are close to the Mississippi River, but not so near that we would get flooded.

It seems unreasonable for them to be so afraid of storms. It's not like we have experienced any devastating storms in our area or had any injuries due to storms. I had a elderly neighbor when I was a teenager who would ask me to come over and sit with her when we were having any thunderstorms and she was home alone. I would gladly agree, because she had a legitimate fear of storms. When she was a very young child her mother was struck by lightning and died as a result. My kids' worst storm experience was last summer when we had massive wind storms, which caused LOTS of trees to fall and the major power outages. I hope they grow out of it!!!