Oh, my, yes-- I just remembered another one from when DD was
very young.
We have lived on the west coast for well over a decade, so DD only has fragmented memories of living anywhere else, and she's never seen anything on the east coast other than on television.
She caught about 15 minutes of here-and-there random coverage of 9/11 when she was just two (nightly news, and some live coverage day-of). She asked questions about it at the time, but we were deliberately VERY vague, other than to note that HUMANS caused the buildings to collapse, not natural causes (this was shortly after the Nisqually quake locally). Four months later, we were driving somewhere on a road trip, and she began WAILING from the back seat of the car after we passed a pulp mill along the highway.
When I calmed her down to a point of coherence, my then 2 yo explained that the very tall stack of the pulp mill had elicited fear that "the building would fall down."
I realized after a few minutes that she simply had no experience with the scale of true skyscrapers, and that she was associating the relative height and profile of the emission smokestack with the mental image that she had, "just like the buildings on TV that fell down when the bad men flew the airplanes into them."
My mind still boggles at this-- she was so little, and it had been so long, and she (I didn't think) had been given enough information to put any of this together.
(This was the same road trip where she later swore viciously at her inability to escape from her car seat, by the way.
)
