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Wednesday's Woe
The Query of a GrandChild
that...
Renders Us Speechless
~Tommy and Angie Prince
During the month of February, we had our 18-month-old grandbaby "Ellie" over for several hours at a time on several different days. One of the best ways to enjoy a new toddler while she is here with us is to wall off one room of the house that is fairly-well child-proofed and plant ourselves in the middle of the room in little Fisher Price chairs so we can be down on her level to play and watch her antics. For us, the best room for that is our kitchen.
As Ellie is exploring her way around the kitchen, when she doesn't know what something is, she will point and say, "Dat?"
Like a lot of families in America, we have pictures of our family up on our refrigerator. Mostly right now, it is limited to our family's three children's pictures. So when Ellie glances up to the top portion of the refrigerator after tiring of putting magnets in various places on the refrigerator that are at her eye-level, she will see these family pictures.
She will then point up on the refrigerator to our son Rollin's picture and will exclaim, "Da-Da!!!" with a bright smile. We will smile back and say, "That's right!"
Then she will point to our son Nathan's picture and say, "Na-Na!" and we will say, "That's right!"
Then she will point to our deceased daughter Merry Katherine's picture, and she will say, "Dat?!"
It's one of the few times we are both rendered speechless in trying to answer our 18-month-old grand baby's question of, "Dat?"
How do we capture her Aunt Merry Katherine's personality in a few words? We will say, "That's Aunt Merry," but little Ellie has a blank look on her face… Fortunately for now, she is only 18-months-old and doesn't push it. Maybe we can buy some time and move beyond our being rendered speechless...
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Right now there's a hole in our world we cannot even grapple with. How do we even begin to explain that to a child?
Suddenly, however, an otherwise delightful time is shattered by a simple one-word question from Ellie: "Dat?"
It is like we are thrown back to square one: How are we going to say, "She is not here and never will be"? For one thing, it's difficult to talk and cry at the same time….
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"In Limbo" Picture, thanks to ~Out of the Ashes
