She's Engaged, Death and the Weight of Parenthood

Sometimes your kids hit you with so much heavy shit in one day you feel like screaming "Give me a break. Could we deal with one major life occurence at a time instead of all in one day?".

Today Kylie announced that she always wanted to live with me and her Dad because she loved us and never wanted to be away from me. While I was possibly considering the option that we would have a child live with us FOREVER..lol, I went ahead and agreed that she should never move out. Lord knows she'll change her mind about this soon enough and I can think of alot worse things than Kylie being my little girl and living with me forever. Well, then she said she had decided who she was going to marry. I realized that that is why she brought up living with me forever and I was glad I told her she could. Well, this boy is in the frog class in her preschool. I told her she had lots of time to consider lots of other boys and she insisted she wasn't going to change her mind. I asked her why she wanted to marry this boy and she said because he protects her when ppl pretend to be dragons and because he's nice to her. Well, at least she didn't say because he's cute. I can think of alot worse reasons to marry a boy than because he protects you and he's nice....

Later, she suddenly asked if Baby Sophie (the baby I'm pregnant with) was going to die the same time as her. Wow, she's always hitting me with the hard stuff. I said no, probably not. That it was going to be a LONG time before she died, a LONG time before Lexie died and a LONG time before Sophie died and they might not die at the same time but it wasn't something she needed to worry about because it was a LONG LONG time away. We've talked about death before. I wanted her to be ready in case someone close to her in our family or her school or one of our friends died. My in-laws are fairly old and my grandmother, her great-grandmother, is 87 so I wanted her to understand death ..well, as much as a 4-year old can but sometimes I worry that she worries too much about it.

Being a parent is so hard sometimes. You have to know exactly the right moment to talk about these heavy issues. You want to protect them. You want to make sure they never experience death of a loved one but you can't, you can't always protect them no matter how much you try so you try to prepare them for those times when you can't protect them but I worry. Am I saying the right things? Am I explaining stuff in the right way? I don't want to burden her with issues before she's ready but I don't want to wait until it's too late and leave her open and unprepared. The weight of parenthood...