All Quiet on the Southern Front

As you've probably guessed by the lack of posting, it's been a weekend of catch-up - catching up on sleep, catching up on housecleaning, and catching up on family time. Quite boring really (although we've had enough turmoil in our past that I'm really quite happy with "boring").

The Husband returned triumphantly home on Friday night and managed to stay up a few hours to help put the kids into their beds before crashing into his own. Somehow both children ended up in our bed in the wee hours, so it was a bit of a crowded, albeit snuggly, wake-up. Our weekly trip to the library was pretty much the major event on Saturday. Today was church followed by the usual weekend child meltdown (I don't know what it is - they both get totally irrational and out-of-control whiny on Sunday afternoons).

The Girl has been displaying some alarming behavior lately (well, alarming if you're a Mennonite liberal pacifist like I, less alarming if you're 15th in a long line of military heroes). She's become fascinated by war.

I mentioned here a few months ago that she enjoyed watching WWII documentaries. Well, on Friday she went to a local museum and was so intrigued by the mock explosion they used to demonstrate a particularly terrible event in the mill's history, that she begged me to tell her about every explosion about which I knew.

(A digression: remember that whole "truth or comfort" debate a few months ago? Well, I find it particularly difficult, nay, almost impossible, to ignore requests for information from my children, partly because I feel that to give them less than the entire explanation as I know it would mean I am lying by omission. This resulted in me describing trench warfare, the Challenger disaster, and September 11th as part of our bedtime routine, which was likely the cause for the "family bed" the next morning.)

On the one hand, I'm appalled even as I recognize the fascination that war and conflict hold for her. On the other, I know that to refuse to talk about it or to be very narrow in the way I allow her to explore the topic will only increase its lure.

So, yes, I have several picture books about WWII in my daughter's room. They're sandwiched between the dollhouse and the fairy poem book. Sigh.