nixtress's Diaryland Diary

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How do you explain war to a 6 yr old?

Pouring rain gloomy, and very fitting.

I'm kind of glum meself today so it's all good, I suppose. I woke up at what felt like an ungodly hour, in one of those quiet contemplative moods. Everyone has them, right? Where you sit and think about things that are depressing and that you normally just shelve until you have a day like this?

With all that's going on lately in the political realm right now, I've got the responsibility of trying to explain to my small humans what's going on and to answer their questions, without getting graphic but without lying to them. And that's proving difficult. Because they're boys, they naturally want to romanticize this whole war thing, guns and tanks and soldiers-OH MY! And it falls to me to help them focus on more than the G.I.Joe aspect of it. Difficult at times to make it make sense to them when it doesn't all make sense to me. In an effort to help the boys to see that beyond the whole big-bang-blowup thing there are human beings, we went to our local chapter of the Red Cross. We are going to send care packages overseas to our soldiers. This is also not a simple task, but I think it's important that they know that those combatboys over there have families they miss too, and it's not all a game.

This parenting stuff isn't always the easiest, ya know. And being a mom, I tend to put my own spin on things, maybe not what a dad would.

I guess I just want my lil beings to have a sense of humanity and compassion.

In other N-land news, Spring cleanup is almost upon us. We live in a burg where you can tout your biggest bunches of junk to the curb and they'll dispose of it for you! And the less financially secure set in our town use this as an opportunity to go shopping. Nothing unusual in seeing people picking thru old sofas and chairs sitting on the side of the street, or digging thru boxes of junk at this time of year here. It's kind of funny, actually, to set out things to see if anyone takes them or if they're officially dubbed trash. So I've got the great fun of dragging the boys' incapacitated swingset out, and this old metal..cabinet that was in the basement when we moved in and needs to GO. Odds and ends other things as well..brush that needs chipped from the backyard will be taken care of by the arborist, and the boys' pool-that-sprung-a-leak...

Amazing to me how much junk one household can accumulate thru a year.

Work tonite. Joy, joy. With the weather being decentish, the drunks will be out in mad force. And there's bound to be lots of domestics. Grand.

Shower time for me.

N.

8:57 a.m. - 2003-03-21

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