For a long time now, Evie has been scared of the basement, particularly of all the monsters that live down there. It seemed somewhat justified; there are scary basement monsters down there! Just kidding, but I bet it was a little frightening to be 3 years old in the basement, all by her lonesome. Not to mention it was sometimes a pain if she woke up in the night to have to go all the way down there. The one nice thing about her being afraid of everything was that, if you put her in her room for relaxing time, she stayed there! Sometimes she would make a break for it, grabbing the largest stuffed animal she could find and sprinting upstairs (and hopefully the gate wasn’t closed when she got to the top of the stairs!), but mostly she stayed put. The whole thing seemed to get worse and worse as time went on, until it got to the point that she would hardly leave the room we were in. She wouldn’t even go to the bathroom next to the kitchen if we were in the kitchen and the door was open, and I maintained eye contact the entire time. Too many monsters.

All of a sudden, the situation reversed itself, without us doing anything. In fact, with us specifically doing nothing: we didn’t want to push the issue and force her, because we sensed that would make it worse. So we literally did nothing. In retrospect, the first signs were that she would sometimes coax Oliver to go into other rooms with her. He couldn’t care less, so he was happy to take her in other rooms, downstairs, etc. But then one day she just decided that it was okay to go in other rooms. Suddenly, she will happily go downstairs by herself to look for a toy she wants, or get an article of clothing. I try to show no reaction, but internally I am always stunned. In fact, she has even started going to the bathroom by herself in the middle of the night. Sometimes we don’t even know she did until she tells us in the morning.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled with the turn of events. It could be very frustrating sometimes when you asked her to do something (get something for you, go to the bathroom by herself, help you in any way) and she declined because she was “scared”. But I really have no idea what could have changed her mind. I can’t think of a single thing that changed, other than just being older. I guess that’s what it took, I don’t know.

Now if we could only get her to stop answering for Oliver before he gets a chance to speak…