Conquering the Elephant

So at the local zoo here (Hogle Zoo) there's this huge fake elephant that makes noises and occasionally sprays out a mist of water. For some reason Brayden is deathly afriad of the thing. You can hear the elephant throughout the majority of the zoo and whenever it starts making a noise, Brayden keeps one eye in the direction of the noise. My parents have a video of Braydens first encounter with the innocent elephant. Brayden has his hands raised above his head, running and screaming for dear life. In his first two visits we've tried everything under the sun to get him to touch the elephant. He'll get close to patting it, then the elephant starts to make noise and he's off again. Funny thing is he has absolutely no fear of the real elephants, he sits there and watches them beat the tar out of their food pinatas and begs to go in there and play with them. However, the fake elephant evokes every fearful emotion in him. This past week we went to the zoo for the 3rd since moving here and after riding the train Brayden begged to go see the elephants, which meant having to walk by the fake elephant. We had my cousin Lori (who is 5)with us and she and Tavita immediately walked up to the thing and started crawling around and under it. Brayden was keeping his usual distance when I tried convincing him to go by Lori and Tavita so we could take a picture. His response was, "No thanks, I'll wait here" and sat down on the bench. We sat Lori and Tavita on the trunk and for some reason Brayden decided that it looked fun enough to overcome his fear and sit with them. He was so proud to have finally touched the elephant but wanted to get down as soon as the picture was taken. Bottom line is, the elephant has been conqured!!!