Noise annoys

"No more noise. Turn off."

This is what Isaac said eight months ago while he was playing with a friend's toy dump truck. It was a rather noisy truck -- it was operated by remote control, and different buttons made engine noises, honked the horn, made an air brake sound, and, most notably, played a raucous heavy metal song.

When I asked Isaac if he liked playing with the truck, he said, "Big yellow dump truck play music. Big dump truck too loud. Little dump truck more better."

Ironically, he received a similar dump truck for Christmas, although he seems to have outgrown his distaste for it. He likes to play with it now, at any rate, although he doesn't spend a lot of time pushing the buttons on the remote control.

He has never been a big fan of loud noises (although he can readily overcome this hesitation under certain circumstances, as when his Opa offers to take him for a ride on the wheel loader). He has been nervous about the vacuum cleaner for nearly his entire life, but in the last two or three weeks he has become positively terrified of select household appliances. I took out the food processor a few weeks ago, and at the very sight of it -- before I even set it down on the counter! -- he began crying. I had to put him in his room before using it, and even then he cried so hard that his entire face became covered in red blotches -- including his nose, which I had never seen happen before.

Every single day he says, "I don't like the food processor. Or the coffee grinder. Or the garbage disposal. I don't like loud things." Unfortunately he's been adding to this list. Today he said, "Or the coffee maker. Or the microwave."

"Really?" I said. "The microwave doesn't make that much noise."

"It's sort of loud," he said.

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He's working through it, though. As he runs his toy vacuum, he says things like, "Sorry, Mama. I have to vacuum. It'll be okay." So then I pretend I'm afraid of the vacuum, which he seems to enjoy. He and Craig have a similar game where Isaac uses a pretend coffee grinder and Craig pretends to be scared of it. And today Isaac told me that one of his alter egos, Loader Driver, actually likes the coffee grinder.

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I don't think I've mentioned Loader Driver before. He's Isaac's grown-up persona, the one who likes spicy foods and shaves, as opposed to Loopy, who is often "just a little puppy" and needs to be babied.