As parents, we need to live with our children with great understanding; it\u2019s a confusing world they\u2019re trying to figure out. Children grow up hearing how Charlotte, the spider, became friends with Wilbur, a cute little farm pig. Then they visit a hog farm or eat pork chops for dinner. They read about Baloo the Bear becoming friends with a human in The Jungle Book<\/em>, and then they see a stuffed grizzly at Cabela\u2019s. And they watch Simba battle his uncle, Scar, after his dad died, and then watch a lion tear apart a monkey on a nature show.<\/p>\n I love these stories, and they expanded and shaped my imagination. It\u2019s just that, as a dad, I\u2019m realizing that they make the journey to understanding life and death in the real world, well, odd. I saw this the other night when Claire tried to cope with seeing a pine martin hunt, catch, and eat a squirrel in the Redwood Forest. After the scene, she swallowed hard, sniffled, and said, \u201cIt\u2019s ok\u2026that squirrel wasn\u2019t that<\/em> cute.\u201d\u00a0 Which told me that, to Claire, it actually was<\/em> that cute.<\/p>\n I\u2019m thankful for our farm. The Briar Patch is sort-of the halfway mark between Disney and Planet Earth. We have chickens, cats, dogs, and fish. When I went home for lunch today, there were over 100 wild turkeys in the cornfield to the east. As I pulled out of the driveway to go back to work, a whitetail doe bounded from our tree line. Most of the animals on our acreage have names, and our kids treat them as pets. Yet\u2026they poop. A lot. And they fight, attack one another, and eventually they die. In three short years of living outside the city limit, we\u2019ve lost three kitties, crippled a chicken, and flushed countless fish down the toilet and into our septic tank.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a hard, cold world at times, and we need stories to warm it up. As parents, we need to put ourselves into our children\u2019s minds to help them process the chilly parts.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been watching Planet Earth with my family. Huge kudos to the BBC Natural History Unit \u2013 these videos are breathtaking. They\u2019re also raw and vivid in their portrayal of the brutality of \u201creal life\u2026 painfully raw and vivid, in my 7-year-old\u2019s opinion. Tonight we watched the \u201cFresh Waters\u201d episode, and Claire shrieked and buried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[815,816,820,185,822,817,62,378,823,814,30,25,65,813,819,184,821,825,824,818],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animals","tag-anthropomorphic","tag-baloo","tag-books","tag-cabelas","tag-charlotte","tag-children","tag-cute","tag-daughter","tag-disney","tag-man-on-the-run","tag-parenting","tag-parents","tag-planet-earth","tag-pork-chop","tag-reading","tag-squirrel","tag-stories","tag-television","tag-the-jungle-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zekepipher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/220\/2012\/12\/squirrel.jpg\" "\\"squirrel\\"")
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