What did you just say?

So just a little while ago, I was sitting on the floor playing with the kids. Sabrina has one of those wooden fruit sets, the kind with velcro that you can use a little wooden knife to cut up and then stick them back together.

She was playing with the little green pear and I have known for awhile that part of it is missing, and I suspect that - along with many, many other missing things in our household right now - it is packed. (Don't ask why only part of the pear would get packed. I can only assume it was lying around during one of the mad packing sessions and it got carelessly tossed in as well.)

Which is a poor answer to a 2-year-old who doesn't get why we can't just go get all those things that have mysteriously disappeared into the world of 'packing' and who gets frustrated because they sure don't seem to be reappearing, despite promises that they will. So when she asked me where the missing piece was, I casually replied that I didn't know, we would have to keep an eye out for it.

"No," she informed me, "It DIED."

I'm sorry, it what?????????? Where on earth does a 2-year-old learn that word? I sat for a second, torn between inquiring further on the topic to find out if she knew what it meant and just letting it go, and I finally settled on asking where she heard that word.

Oh, she replied, Daddy.

So I dropped the topic with her because she was clearly not upset about the apparent loss, and emailed my husband at work. His reply just came back through, and he thinks he may have slipped the other day and said that his cell phone died.

Sometimes when I think about how Sabrina is paying attention to absolutely EVERYTHING and soaking it all in, even when we think she's totally busy with something else, it makes me feel so tired. How will we teach her what we want her to learn and keep her from that which she doesn't need to know about yet? I know, I know, she obviously doesn't know what 'dying' means yet. In the small scheme of things, it's not a big deal. In the bigger sense of things, it really kind of is. I'm not really ready to explain death to her yet.

Where's that big giant bubble for me to put her in? It's about time one shows up. This whole world is just a bit too big for her to be in sometimes.