Our fish Arnold died last night. I did the cleanup and rehearsed what to say to the twins in the morning when they noticed his bowl was gone. They're both super observant, so it only took about 30 seconds in the kitchen before Aaron asked "Where's Arnold?"
I said "Guys, Arnold died last night," and got ready to launch into my Socratic lesson on death, but after fielding only one follow-up question, "Where'd he go?", they seemed more interested in going outside to play in the snow than discussing our mortality. BTW, I don't remember the answer to "Where'd he go", but it wasn't "heaven" or "the toilet"...both of which might be true depending on how you look at it.
Also, Aaron is alllllmost reading these days. He can look at a few common words and recognize them (family names, road signs), and on most short words he can recite the letters. I'll help him with sounding out the word in a Sesame Street sort of way...."SSS TTT AAWWWW PPPP" "SSSTTOOOPP" "STOP!"
Posted by joe at November 30, 2006 10:11 AMI want to know what your Socratic speech you had prepared was. I've had to give the death discussion a few times and now Karsten is obsessed with it.
Exciting about the reading! I just checked out the "Leappad Letter Factory" on Netflix and it has been great for memorizing the sounds of the alphabet. Highly recommend it.
Posted by: jana on November 30, 2006 11:02 AM | Reply to thisWell, since it was going to be a dialectic, the boys were going to ask me a bunch of questions about death and I was going to expertly field them all, without falling into the pit traps that make children have issues like "Are my grandparents going to die now too?" or "Was it my fault?" But honestly, I don't remember the details of what I imagined the dialogue to be.
Thanks for the DVD rec, I added it to my netflix queue.
Posted by: joe on November 30, 2006 03:01 PM | Reply to this