Definitely His Mommy's Boy

Wesley is definitely my kid. He looks like me and my side of the family. He's a big ham and, if I'm being really honest, he probably gets his nonstop talking from me too.  Unfortunately, he seems to have also inherited my fear of storms.

I HATE storms. When the sky gets dark and the winds start to blow, my heart rate rises and I start to feel a little panicked. I try really hard to hide my fear when the kids are around, but sometimes it's really hard.

Tonight I heard the tornado sirens go off as I was getting dinner pulled together. I am not a person who can ignore tornado sirens - especially since the house we live in has a cellar rather than a basement, meaning we have to go outside to get to it. I'm telling you, if we ever get to move I am insisting on a house with a basement - preferably a finished basement. Anyhow, the sirens were going off, so I moved to the family room and turned the news on.

Now I don't know how many of you live in central Ohio, but anytime there is a storm of any kind, or even the threat of a storm of any kind, our news teams treat it like the world is about to end on a moments notice. I was watching to track the storm and see if we needed to get shoes on and head outside and downstairs, but Wesley picked up on the anxiety of the newscasters (and probably of his mom). Within moments, Wesley was convinced that a tornado was about to come out of the sky and kill us all.

We kept showing him where the storm was the worst and where we were on the map (no place near the worst of the storm), but that didn't calm him. We kept telling him that there had not been a tornado yet. No one has seen one. A tornado had NOT come out of the sky in our city tonight. I told him that I am 38 years old and there has never been a tornado in Columbus in that time. Nothing helped. He sat on the couch and stressed. And of course, since I am afraid of storms too, I didn't want to change the channel, even as I tried to downplay the whole thing to Wesley.  When the rain and hail finally hit our neighborhood, I thought he was going to pass out!

Wesley didn't calm down until 7:00 when the warning was lifted. Now he's running around the house acting like nothing was ever wrong. In the case of storms, I wish he was a little less my kid.