Strangers in a normal land: My son is afraid of grass

You know that we are city folk when our little man hasn't really seen grass since the 4th of July. Oh, yes, we are totally urban jungle people. It's not like he's been indoors since then, he played on our deck during summer BBQ season, we would go out for walks to meet Daddy for lunch at the Chinese Kitchen or meet him on his way home from work to play on the swings, but the parks are not grassy, we had no backyard, and none of our visits with friends included yards for the rest of the summer either.

Then winter struck and it struck hard. There wasn't even really a decent time to introduce him to snow with the awful weather we had for most of this winter. Then we move to Oxford where we do have a back yard (garden here), and it has grass to boot. It's not like they really have winter here except for that week and a half of snow that shut the whole country down, but the garden has been wet and it's been pretty cool for the most part so I haven't felt like venture out that way with him. Today was quite warm and even sunny in spots and Jeff thought it might be fun to put him in his grubbies and let him crawl around on the grass.

Great! I'll get my camera.

Now at least I didn't go back and actually take pictures of what happened when we sat him down and let him touch the grass, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it was like on this youtube video. Only it was more screaming as opposed to the whining that kid does. Let me backtrack a bit and set it up for you.

Jeff walks Asher down the little path to our patch of grass in the back. All is well and good until he sees the grass. He does a dead stop at the edge of the path.

Won't move. We manage to coax him a little farther onto the green stuff.

Okay, he hasn't died yet, but he's really not comfortable with how this is going.

We gently sit him down on the grass. There are no pictures of what follows, I couldn't bring myself to. He put his hands down so he could crawl away and found that he was now touching the grass, so he tried the other side of him and there was more grass. By this time he's screaming like those menacing blades are attacking him.

So we scooped him up and promptly began torturing him by waving bits of the frightening stuff in his face.

And touching his hands with it. Poor little man tried to scramble out of my arms at that. So we decided to stop being such horrible parents and try to salvage ourselves from going to hell for cruelty to the innocent and rescued him from the green monster to the indoors where he could feel more secure.