She loves them, she loves them not

Bethany has this very weird love/hate relationship going on with airplanes. She loves them and at the same time is terrified of them. We see large planes low in the sky quite often at our house, on their way to landing at the Air Force base. The girls always get excited to see them, and point them out whenever they do. The problem is that they’re not too fond of the noise. Most of the time it’s quiet enough that it doesn’t scare them too badly, but the other day we were outside when a couple of fighter jets flew by. Those things are loud! Especially when they’re so low. Needless to say, both of them were terrified, and we had to come inside.

Last April, we flew out to Utah for Pamela’s wedding. The girls were pretty good on the airplane. Meagan liked looking out the window, but Bethany kept closing hers. All went well until we were landing in Vegas. We hit a pretty bad pocket of turbulence about fifteen minutes out, and Bethany was absolutely terrified. During most of the drive to Cedar City, she kept saying, “No more airplane today, no more airplane today.” Getting back on to fly home two weeks later was a bit of a trick.

But since she likes to look at planes so much, we decided we should take a trip to the Air Force Museum here at the base. Nate had a day off, so we went. I couldn't get Bethany past the little gift shop in the front. She started crying and crying. Granted, the hangars inside the museum are a little dark, but I'm still not sure what she was afraid of. I took her out, and tried to go back again a bit later, and she still wouldn't have anything to do with it. Maybe it was too much like the airport for her, and she thought we were getting on a plane? I don't know. It didn't matter what we told her, she was not going in. So we settled for looking at the planes outside. For some reason she was okay with those, especially after we told her they were broken and weren't going anywhere. She kept repeating that to herself like some kind of mantra, "The planes are broken, the planes are broken, they're stuck." I bought her a guidebook to the museum, which has pictures of all the planes in the museum with information about each of them, and she absolutely loves that book. I even caught her kissing pictures of one of the planes yesterday. It's very well-worn already. I just don't get why she wouldn't go inside the museum.

Bethany said this plane has eyes.