Whew. It's been a big few days for Eli's brain, our hearts. Struggling with the concept of death related to the people he loves in the wake of learning that the father of one of Pat's students was killed. With a gun. A bullet. To the head.

Right.

He probably didn't need to know the details. Maybe he didn't need to know the story at all. But Pat's reasoning was that he's been making guns of everything...puzzle pieces, sticks, play-doh. I know this is normal. Normal-ish. But we want him to understand the seriousness of gun violence. So we tell him regularly that guns are very dangerous. We don't want him playing like he's shooting people. Okay, to shoot at pretend animals, but not even pretend people.

He seemed to take this as fact, the news about the student's dad. Like he did with Inky. "Hi. My name's Eli. You have a dog. We had a cat named Inky. She died."

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/18