Silas and the Baby

I mentioned on Wordless Wednesday that Silas was hiding from “the human baby.” I didn’t mean to leave you all hanging. This is my brother’s new baby, who is about four months old now. (My nephew is almost 15.)

I have to say, I was simultaneously impressed and saddened by Silas’s reaction to lots of things on this trip back home. Sad because he was such a nervous wreck the whole time. Impressed because he managed to be pretty functional in spite of it. I’ll post about some of his other challenges over the next few days.

As for the baby: if it had been my baby (heaven forbid), with a “proper” introduction, I think he would have come around to being okay with her. Except for a few outliers, his reactions were, for him, fairly mild anxiety. I don’t think it would have ever amounted to anything except some barking, but obviously I had to make sure there was a less than zero chance that it could. So our interactions with the baby were mostly quick sniffs of the person holding the baby as we passed along to other places in the house.

The thing Silas did take a little hard was my mother’s defection to camp baby. My mother is the only person in the world, aside from my husband and I, that Silas truly loves. He’s okay with my dad, and he’s getting there with my in-laws, but my mother is his BFF. And then she went to the store one day and came home with baby toys instead of dog toys. Silas was crushed. If I hadn’t been there to see it, I wouldn’t have believed that he would even have noticed. She had to go out the next day and buy a new toy for Silas.