Scariest thing in the world, if you're 3

For Christmas 2006, M's company had their holiday party at the zoo. Our zoo does this really wonderful holiday thing called Zoo Lights, where they decorate the whole zoo with Christmas lights. A lot of them are in the shape of animals, and they are animated. They move. Think of those little flipbooks you used to make as a kid in order to create animation. The lights work sort of like that. Anyway, it makes for a great company party, and I've gone to at least four Christmas parties there over the years that I can remember.

So last year, it was frigid, just like it always is at Zoo Lights. It's guaranteed that if M or I have a holiday party at the zoo, the temperature will drop down to around zero. (Supporting evidence: this year, my party was at the Botanic Gardens. It was warm and toasty, in the 30s at least. I'm positive that if we'd had it at the zoo again, it would have been positively arctic.) We decided to go into the hippo house to warm up. The elephants were standing off to one side, staring silently at the handful of people inside. The rhinos were on the other side, apparently sound asleep. The hippos, all three of them, were in their pool, swimming underwater. All in all, very quiet and not terribly exciting. Every now and then, a hippo would come up for air, and we'd all go "ooooooh."

After about 30 seconds of this, B's attention span was shot. He started wandering around the open area in the middle of the hippo house, examining the artwork painted by the elephants. At this particular moment, one of the hippos came up for air again, and as it did, it let out a deafening roar. Have you ever heard a hippo? It sounds like a cross between an elephant and a lion. It's a big, BIG sound, and it was amplified by the small, low-ceilinged concrete building we were in.

Upon hearing that noise, B shot straight up into the air, let out a piercing scream of pure terror, did a 180 in midair, and started sprinting for the door before his feet even hit the ground, sobbing hysterically as he ran. A zoo volunteer happened to be walking in the door of the hippo house and witnessed the whole thing, and I distinctly heard her giggle as I ran past her after B, trying but failing to stifle my own laughter.

The poor kid cried HARD for a good five minutes, and couldn't get away from that place fast enough. He clung to us for the rest of the time we were at the zoo, insisting we carry him everywhere. For the next six months, he refused to go back to the zoo. We finally convinced him to go back last summer, but only on the condition that we not visit the hippos, or even go near that general section of the zoo. Just this morning, B was talking about going to the zoo, but he made sure to add, "But not to see the hippos Mommy, OK?"

I'm pretty sure B will have a lifelong fear of hippos. That's OK. B is not terribly likely to run into hippos on a daily basis. Think of his poor daddy, who has had to live with a fear of birds since age five.