Rejecting Comfort

The girl can throw a tantrum. I don't know if her grandparents have seen a category 5 Hurricane Halle before, but when she gets frustrated or hears no too many times consecutively... she could fell a tree. I kid, I kid. What she does do is go limp, scream, shake her head back and forth, and cover her tiny little eyes with her tiny little palms to cry. Understandably, she doesn't want to be comforted by the person that made her so angry.

What startles me, though, is this: say she bumps her head when she comes out from under her side-table fort. She reaches to touch her head, looks right at Brad or me, and starts to cry. What do you think she'd do next? Run to either of us and bury her head in our lap?

Nope. We reach out for her, we call her to us, we go to pick her up, we tell her she'll be okay, we say, let us hold you. Let us kiss it. She recoils. She recoils as if we'll only make it worse.

I wonder why she'd rather run to her big stuffed puppy or her blanket which are comfort objects that are the psychological comforting equivalent to a parent when one must seperate for bedtime. I read an article about it just the other day HERE. Is it bizarre that she'd rather run to a parent equivalent than a parent?

Sometimes I wonder. What am I doing wrong? I looked through our Dr. Spock tome last night, but I truly didn't know where to start. What word to look for in the glossary. I'm not finding much online either. It seems to be implied that toddlers want to be comforted by their parents. There is also another concensus: toddlers are freakin' crazy people. They go through phases by the hour. Maybe this is one of them.