About a month ago we had a series of thunderstorms roll through. One storm hit with a bang while the kids were out in the backyard. Or maybe I should say BOOOOM, because it rattled the house. I was in the kitchen and it made me jump. Then I heard the sound of Patches terrified screams dopplering toward me as he fled for the safety of his mommy. This event made a deep impression in his mind. We have frequent conversations about Thunder Monsters even on sunny days.
We live close enough to Hill Air Force Base that we get fairly frequent fly overs by military aircraft. One thing about military craft is that you don’t hear them coming. In fact they deliberately design them so that people won’t hear them coming, but you always hear them leaving. I don’t know what it was that flew over our house this evening. It was really high, and really loud for a very long time. The rumble hit suddenly and slowly tapered away over the course of several minutes. Patches was outside when the first wave of sound rolled over. Again I heard the terrified screams dopplering to the house. He was so scared that he tripped on the deck thus acquiring a scrape and splinters.
Patches is extremely verbal and he always has to talk through an upsetting event. It seems to be part of the way he sorts his experiences and makes sense of them. He had this to say: “The funder monster came and pooped on me! Maked me splinter! Funder monster in sky! And airplane was loud. Funder monster is scawy.” Our conversation reiterated all these points several times, but most upsetting to him was his complete conviction that the thunder monsters pooped on him. My best guess is that there was a physical sensation associated with the onset of the airplane noise, possibly a sonic boom.
At least he knows where to run when he’s scared.
If you can’t hear military planes coming, it’s because they’re flying faster than the speed of sound, or close enough to it that they’ve almost reached you before their sound does.
That’s cute. Gave me a cute story chuckle.
The other day when we were walking home from school, our barely cloudy sky starting dripping on us. SoccerGirl looked at the sidewalk and said,
“Look! Raindrop Footprints!”
I love kid’s perspectives and descriptions of their environment!
My aunt doesn’t live near a military base, but we still get military aircraft flyovers here. They like to do practice bombing runs on our airport.