Tags
light, SAD, sun sensitivitiy, sunglasses, sunshine, toddlers, travel
Owl is well nicknamed.
You guys did a good job with that.
Boy oh boy, is he an Owl. My child hates the sun. HATES IT.
He is a true child of Vancouver.
He happily announces that “it’s sunny out, today” if it happens to not be raining.
And if sun gets in his eyes? Oh boy. Screaming, writhing, gnashing of teeth. “AAAH, SUNNY! NO! MAKE SUN GO ‘WAY! AAAAAAARGH….” I expect him to wail that he’s meeeeelting and simply disappear into a puddle.
It’s weird because he’s not particularly reactive to other aspects of environment. He doesn’t mind fluctuations of temperature, he’s not picky about textures or textiles, he doesn’t cover his ears when things get too loud. He doesn’t mind the dark. But sun? Sun is EVIL.
One morning there was a glorious sunrise outside, and he was scared of it.
“No go in sunrise! NO! Make sunrise go ‘WAY!”
Clearly he thought the sun was overtaking the world with its fiery minions.
It’s hard to believe he is related to me. I grew up on the island of Curacao, which looks like this: 
Rain was so rare there that when it happened, the teachers let us out of class to go play in it. Every now and then it would rain so hard that the storm drains would overflow and we would get a Rain Day off school, but that only happened once every couple of years.
I wonder if that is why I’m so sensitive to the seasons. I get so sluggish and sleepy and depressed in the winter, whereas in summer I am much less depressed (usually) and often an insomniac. Maybe I just got accustomed to sunlight when I was a kid.
The sun charges my batteries, lightens my gloom, and colours my world.
Meanwhile, my child thinks that the sun is everything that is wrong and evil.
The only thing we agree on about the sun is that it makes us sneeze. The first sign I had that he was related to me (we hadn’t noticed his webbed toe, yet, which he got from me) was when we took him home from the hospital and he sneezed in the sun. The sun always makes me sneeze.
But to me, it’s just a sneeze. When the sun makes Owl sneeze he screams and writhes as though he thinks he’s going to sneeze himself into dust, even though he doesn’t mind sneezes in general.
Anyway, you can imagine how much he liked that warm California sun.
The first two days at Disneyland we had to keep our little vampire in the shade at all times, because every time the stroller had to enter direct sunlight Owl would go from happy irrepressible extrovert to writhing ball of screaming misery. “AAH, NO, SUNNY. SUN HURTED MY EYES, NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Even if we handed him something to hide his face behind he would moan and squirm and sob until we were safely back in the shade.
So I started to look for sunglasses. It is HARD to find sunglasses to fit his tiny little head. Every set I looked at was size three and up. Owl was wearing 12 months shirts. You can imagine how well the search for sunglasses went. I spent our entire week in Vegas shopping for sunglasses for him with no success, and now I was repeating the continuous string of disappointments in Anaheim.
Eventually, on the night of the second day, I found a pair that almost fit. So I bought them, telling him that they would make the sun go away.
Well, it worked. The next day was cloudy.
But it’s okay, Owl will use them. You see, spring is arriving in Vancouver, and the other day it was partly sunny, and he was NOT IMPRESSED.
Problem solved.
