While waiting at a red light on the way home from school a few weeks ago, Alice, Simon and I found ourselves behind a truck pulling a trailer. I didn't pay much attention to it until Alice, ever vigilant for new and exciting bits of information, asked what it was. It can sometimes be difficult to identify what she is looking at when she says, "What's that?" from the back seat but this time is was pretty easy. The trailer had two huge reflective triangles and large sign reading "DEER FOR TIGER RESCUE."
Now, Sera and I have adopted a parenting technique where we usually give answers as they are, and in plain language. There is usually a reason for all the things that happen in life, maybe especially around small kids, and if at all possible this is where we begin in our various explanations. I think it started out as an inside joke for Sera and I when Alice was very little, but it quickly became clear that she was probably picking up more than we knew and it also saved us the trouble of making up a dumbed-down version that might (or might not) make more sense to her.
So in the van that day I told Alice that the trailer was used to carry dead deer, that the dead deer had been hit and killed by cars, that the deer were picked up from the side of the road, and that they were fed to tigers. When we saw the trailer, it was empty. She may have asked a follow-up question or two but we were almost home and the exchange was lost to the usual commotion of the daily routine.
A week or so then passed without any more talk about dead deer being fed to tigers. I forgot about the incident but it must have been stewing away in Alice's head because she recently started to ask me to tell her the "story about the deer" or just "tell me about the deer." At first I had no idea what she meant but I eventually figured it out that she wanted to hear about the need for that trailer. For the last week Alice has asked for the story about the deer at least twice a day. So here is the story of the deer in bullet form:- There are deer walking though the forest
- They are eating leaves and plants
- There is a road going through the forest.
- They eat all the food in one area and want to cross the road.
- They are not smart enough to look both ways before they go across the road
- BAM!
- A car hits the deer and kills it
- Someone calls about a dead deer on the side of the road
- The trailer comes to pick it up
- The dead deer is fed to tigers
The story now has a life of it's own and is gaining new features and activities. After completing the yard work on Sunday, Alice wanted to draw with chalk on the driveway, and I illustrated the deer story. On Monday night, I invented a new game where the bear is the deer trying to cross the road, Alice is the oncoming vehicle, and the baby doll is the tiger that will eat the dead dear. Alice was mostly interesting in the part where she slams into the deer.
Sera insists these files will be useful documents for when Alice gets referred to the school psychologist for being too morbid.
Here is an article about the actual trailer we saw. The writer of the article also has a morbid sense of humor, so maybe there's a place for people like Alice in society after all.
