Why on earth, you may ask is my child eating his breakfast while squatting on the kitchen counter? Because he's afraid of the dog. Toby is merely an 85 pound Rottweiler/Lab mix, so I can't imagine why Caleb is afraid of him. :-) Yes, he's large, but he loves children. This is the same dog that allowed Benjamin to pull on his penis one day when Ben was much younger and didn't even flinch. I figure if he was ever going to bite a child, that would have been the moment.

Fear of animals in children who have never been around them is quite common. Benjamin, Micheline and now Caleb have all been afraid of our pets when they first arrived home. When Ben came home we had a German Shepherd and a Cockapoo. Although he wasn't as terrified of them as the other two children have been of our pets, he kept a respectful distance and wanted them to stay out of the house. One day when the sliding glass door was open and they had stuck their heads in, he ran and got a flashlight and shined it in their eyes. They backed away from the light and he hurriedly shut the door and then triumphantly grinned.

Micheline was terrified of Toby the first time she laid eyes on him. Even though he was on the outside of the sliding glass door and Jeff was holding her, she literally tried to climb Jeff's back up to his head. She screamed for weeks if she even had to walk near the back door. It didn't matter that he was on the outside and she was on the inside.

Since Micheline joined our family in the winter and it was cold outside, we decided we needed to speed up the process of her overcoming her fear of the dog. We let him in, but put him in a down/stay while she stayed safely up on the couch. We encouraged the other children to pet him and talk to him so she could see that he would not hurt her. It took about a month, but over time she began to overcome her fear.

I wasn't sure how Caleb would respond to the dog since at 11 he is much older than the other two were when they arrived home. He'd seen dogs in China, but admittedly, most of them weren't more than a foot off the ground and were safely attached to a six foot leash. When he saw Toby he didn't scream in terror...until Toby came into the house for the night.

To be continued...