Scare tactics

Sometimes, with a two-year old, you just have to do what you have to do – even if you resort to scare tactics.

Early on, Harmon was deathly afraid of this bouncing Tigger that my parents have at their house. When you push him down, he yells “I’m gonna’ bounce” and then he starts bouncing. Harmon actually was OK until Tigger started bouncing toward him and then it was all over. He likes all other forms of Tigger – at Toys R Us and even on TV (damn Tigger and Pooh) – but this particular Tigger has always freaked him out. Over the weekend, we were at my parents’ house and we brought Tigger out again to see if things have gotten any better. Harmon is cordial now but they’re definitely not BFF!

Since he’s warming to Tigger a bit, we’ve had to introduce another big cat to scare him with – the black panther. One random day before the holidays, he was doing something I didn’t want him to do and I simply blurted “you don’t want the black panther to get you, do you?” Ever since then, it has stuck! For his birthday, he received “Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?” and there is a black panther on a page of that book (scanned image above) to make it all the more real. When he gets to that page, it reads “black panther, black panther, what do you see?” and, instead of reading the proper response, Harmon says “I see Harmon’s legs!” Kevin and I die – we must tell him all too often that the panther is going to eat his legs!

We use the black panther a lot, mostly to get Harmon to eat. If he’s being a good boy, we’ll tell him the black panther is at Charlie’s house (Charlie is one of his friends from school). I recently found the cutest black panther stuffed animal and sent the link to Kevin. He said that getting Harmon a cute and cuddly black panther would make us lose our edge. Amen to that - the mythical black panther lives on!