Today was kind of a special day for me and the " Irish" twins today. Today they got a minor concept of death.
We have a white cat named Felony and 2 Yorkie dogs. I'm just going to talk about the boy Yorkie, Jack.We have a Blue Jay nest in our back yard. (We live in the woods in good ol' CT ). The Blue Jay nest had 2 babies, the baby birds my kids have been keeping an eye on and watched them hatch from eggs. The Mommy bird today decided to try and teach them how to fly. Well, they both flew and fell. The cat ( Felony ) and the dog ( Jack ) decided to each get one. This was all in my 2 kids presence. My daughter and son decided to retrieve the baby birds from the cat and dog. They were successful but one baby bird was severely hurt. This was around the time that I discovered the two of them had birds in their little hands. I grabbed a box and put the two baby birds in it, and filled the box up with nesting stuff. Well, my son's bird that he "saved" didn't make it. I took the baby bird and buried it with him in the back woods. The second baby bird was fine. We had a problem though. The baby bird couldn't fly and I sure as heck didn't know how to feed it. So, we came to the understanding that we would have to put the baby back in its nest if we wanted it to have half a chance. So my daughter climbed the tree and my son held the bird until she made it to the nest. He handed her the baby bird and into the nest it went. ( Now, I know that most birds would most likely kill the baby because of human touch, but I really hoped not and I thought that this was the birds only chance for survival). About 15 minutes later after scrubbing the hell out of the two of them, my son, Bear baby (6 yrs old) was starring at me with these huge blue eyes, trying to be a tuffy. He asked me where the dead baby bird goes to and if I thought he really made it to heaven. His face turned real red and big ol tears started rolling down his cheeks. The whole time he's trying to keep a tough face on. I grabbed him and gave him the biggest hug and he let loose. He just couldn't understand why God would let the baby birdie die, even after he tried to save him. He felt so bad and I felt so bad too. I told him that it was ok to cry and that sometimes things have to die even if it makes no sense to us. That maybe one day we'll understand why........RIP baby blue bird..