I was Outside around lunchtime today and my eldest shot out, Mummy I want to be a heffalump!
Cool, I replied When?
For my next life, I want to be a heffalump before I choose to be a boy again. 

And he shot back inside again. Many people are startled by how easy he talks about death, he doesn't fear it and he is strong in his belief what will happen next. For some reason it makes people uncomfertable, I say "some reason" but I'm pretty sure I understand why.
The society we live in has placed such a  great emphasis on life beauty and everlasting youth we as a whole seem to have forgotten the wisdom and knowledge that comes with age. We no longer appreciate the cycle that excists on this earth. We have dismembered ourselves from it, we put our elders in homes locked away from society waning away silently and I imagine very lonely too.
Old age has become something ugly and unwanted and with that death has been silenced not to be spoken about.

I must admit that talking about this was not a consious decison on my part it just happend and grew. We live in a little town and all repatriated soldiers arrive on an airbase just outside town and then go from there trough out highstreet to their final destination.  The first time we stood at the side of the road watching the hearse go past Euan was two and a half, he stood there and watched silently, the second time ( I need to add that I never planned a trip into town to coincide with this) he asked what was going on, I explained and he shouted (rather loudly)
Llike Rodney does to the birds??
Rodney is our cat.
The hearse passed and we carried on walking home and we chatted about what happens to the birds and what happend to the soldiers.
And then came the next question, the one I secretely dreaded.
What happens after you are dead.


I knew what I believed what happend but could I just bring this to him as fact? I mean I don't want to force a belief on him that might not fit him like I had done to me. We where nearly home at that point I promised him to talk more about it after lunch and we had a race home.
We had lunch and both forgot about it and carried our day on as normal and it wasn't until Rodney brought back his latest victim that the conversation was started again.
We talked about souls and how the body is  a vessel for the soul, how when your body dies your soul gets to move on to a new life.

We now often have conversations about what body we will choose in our next life and I am very glad we talked about this so early on. With my Mother having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, my Opa dying and various pets dying the past couple of years he understood what happend (or would happen) and he isn't afraid of that.

Whilst I still feel strongly that no one should be forced into a belief system or religion, I am here to teach  him my values and morals and not someone elses (one of the reasons we home educate!)  He is free to believe what he chooses to believe and he is free to choose a religion if he wants to.

That was for me the most important thing to keep in mind when I started to talk about his all with him, that unlike my childhood, his childhood was filled with multiculti and multi religion and that he allways has the freedom to explore and he will allways have someone there to encourage him to delve a little deeper to get the answer he wants. Our home is a like a mini library with the Bible and the Koran standing spine to spine in the bookcase, right next to the Geeta and a book with Sutra's.

Sometimes he will grab a book and read trough a few pages ask me questions and we have little chats about something, like heaven is it real? did the floods really hapen and did Noah really build a ship large enough to have 7 pairs of some animals and 2 pairs of others?

I am happy now with teaching him what I belief so early on that right now he is not afraid and is able to deal with the grief that death brings.

How did you handle that question when it came up?

Illness sounds so serious! it wasn't too bad typical childhood bug.
Thursday Willow the eldest of our twins was quiet and very unlike himself. Het sat around on the sofa and didn't really do anything. I tucked him in with some nice blankets, read stories to him and brought  him cars to drive around on the sofa with. Thursday afternoon he fell asleep on the sofa. Very unlike him, all my boys stopped napping before their second birthday.
Somewhere inbetween falling asleep and waking up he got a fever and right away it hovered around the 39 celcius and it stayed there for 24 hours.
He slept very lightly, waking up regularly to have small sips of water and maybe watched a few minutes of a movie before drifting of again. Thursday night he slept snuggled in my arms serving as my little hot waterbottle.
And then just as suddenly as the fever came on it dissapeared again.

In the 24 hours that he was so unwell, we smudged we gave healing reiki and had a programmed crystal under his pillow which he regularly took out to stroke and look at. He likes being massaged especially his feet and hands and would often pull my cold hands (I still had my chores outside) onto his forehead before drifting of again.

We didn't give paracetamol but just allowed the body to heal itself, all too often people take medication when the body is perfectly able to heal itself and with doing so we weaken our system.
I like to think of our immunesystem as a muscle that needs building and by not allowing it to deal with minor illnesses like this one we don't allow it to develop.

Friday night he was tired but his old self was back, he had started to boss his brothers around, insisted he wasn't tired and demanded another story. I'm pretty certain he was asleep before his head hit the pillow!

This morning he seems to have forgotten all about yesterday and is back to taking of his clothes as soon as I put them on and playing like a 3 year old should.
There you go a peek into our life when one of the little ones isn't well :)