Elise has always been a social kid. She has been in daycare three days a week since she was a mere three months old. Not only that, but she has been in two different daycares with various staffing changes and shift changes, so she is used to different faces and has always been comfortable with lots of different people. She never went through any stranger anxiety that children often go through at around 9 or 10 months. She never cared who was holding her when she was a baby. She has never been the type of child to cry when her parents leave her with someone else and she has certainly never been shy around strangers.
Well, times have changed! Practically overnight, Elise has become extremely shy and completely terrified of strangers. I am not talking about the typical toddler-hide-behind-your-leg kind of shy. Oh, no, that would be too easy! I'm talking about the kind of shy where she sees a stranger and breaks into hysterical crying. Not whining, not a tear or two - hysterical crying. My mom will say that this is some sort of payback for me because I was like that from the minute I was born until I was in elementary school. I feel like the last few weeks of this has been plenty pay back and am hoping that this is just a phase.
A few weeks ago my friend Shoshana came to visit for the weekend. Elise has met Shoshana several times before - in fact we went on vacation for a week with her family last summer. She sees pictures of Shoshana in our house and points her out and says her name. So she is not even a stranger! Yet, when Shoshana walked into the room (the last time Elise saw her was in November), Elise started crying hysterically. She eventually warmed up and has talked about Shoshana non-stop since she left, but it was a rocky start. 
A few days later, we were giving a ride to some people from work so we picked them up on the way to Ellie's daycare. When they got in the car, Elise completely freaked out - cried and cried the entire way to daycare. I was in the backseat with her and this seemed to be no comfort. The strangers were in the car! She would not get over it. Then a few days after that, there was a new woman at the daycare (she is doing her practicum there for the summer) and when Ellie spotted her, she refused to go inside the daycare. The poor woman had to leave the room just so Ellie would stop freaking out and come in the building! I suppose there are pluses to being wary of strangers, but the hysterical crying is not good for anyone. In fact for the past month or so, Elise has been extremely emotional about everything. If she gets in trouble, she cries. If she doesn't get her way, she cries. If she falls down, she cries. It's like her emotions are right there and the slightest thing sets her off and makes her cry hysterically. I think that it is her way of having a tantrum, which may or may not be better than falling to the ground kicking your legs and feet and screaming like a maniac (which she does not do - she just stands there and cries).
When this all first started a few weeks ago, she'd start crying for what seems like no reason and we would repeatedly ask her to use her words and ask for what she wants or tell us what is wrong instead of crying. This was getting us nowhere, so we have started having "crying timeouts" to see if we can resolve the crying issue without going nutty. Whenever she starts crying, we remove her from the situation and let her cry and then when she's done, we can go back to playing or whatever. She has obviously taken to the new system - maybe a little too much - because now during her timeouts she will tell us "I done crying now" or sometimes when she's about to start crying or has started crying she'll say "Ellie need a timeout". The other day she went up to Marty and said "Ellie crying. I need a timeout with Daddy" despite the fact that there was no sign of any tears or looming emotional breakdown. I think she just wanted some quality Daddy-Ellie time. Since we started crying time outs I have noticed a little drop in the emotional breakdowns. I am still hoping that both the crying and the stranger anxiety are just phases that are nearing their ends. We shall see!
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