Is anybody there….

Well it's been a really long time since I've posted anything.  I was looking back though and realized this is like my baby book for Harper.  I've documented everything on here.  I don't want to lose those memories, so I'm going to try to be better.

Today Harper's fish died.  It was one of those beta fish that somehow managed to live two years even though I was terrible at cleaning it's little tank and remembering to feed it.  Part of me just wanted to flush the thing down the toilet figuring Harper probably wouldn't even notice.  But I knew this was my opportunity to talk with Harper in a not so scary way about death.  We just told her that Red was really old and had lived longer than little fish like him were supposed to.  Joe had the good idea of taking him to the river and saying goodbye to him there.  So we walked down to the path and said one nice thing each about Red and then put him in the river.

I tried to avoid saying Red was sick because I wasn't sure if she would think that if she or one of us got sick that we would die.  All in all, I really don't know how much she understood anyway.  But I figured it was a small chance to start talking about something really big.

I know that we will have many big talks in our future.  I just don't think I'm ready to have such a grown up little kid.  It's too bad we can't shelter them from scary things forever.  I'm glad we took even just the littlest bit of time to talk with her about death.  I hope that we won't have to talk about it again for a very long time.