Survival of the Scaredest

Eliza inherited a lot of things from me. Some are obvious (like the face parts) but some are not so obvious. I have an overdeveloped sense of "freak out," which I use whenever I don't know someone is home and they knock on my door to talk to me, or something much more sinister. . . say something out loud, especially my name. I gasp, jump eight feet, my eyes get real big, and I start breathing heavily. And that's how I know I'm not alone. Overall, it's not a very efficient sense, but it is effective.

Eliza has learned both this sense of freak out and the hypnotic trances that lead up to it. When she's tired, she starts to get really quiet and stare at things, much more than any person should. That's when you know that no matter what you say or do, it's going to scare the living daylights out of her.

"Hey Eliza, want some milk?"

The worst part is that she looks at me with the face of "how could you??" and it just kills me. The last time it happened was when I said "saude" to her sneeze. There was a long enough delay between sneeze and speech that she was able to get in to "the zone." Poor poor thing.

Disclaimer: mock photography. I do not purposefully scare my baby to decorate blog posts.