The Lord is My Shepard

While on vacation this past month Nadia turned 5 and we spent the day with our family in Texas. For her birthday she got some money and when we got back home we asked her what she wanted to buy with her birthday money and she said she wanted Little House on the Prairie that she had watched while at her cousins. I ordered the first season and for the past couple of weeks we watch an episode at night before we go to bed. A couple nights ago we came to the episode titled "The Lord is My Shepard" and a year ago we probably would have skipped over this one. It starts out with the mom, Caroline, telling Charles that she is pregnant and she ends up having a baby boy and he passes away a short time later. They really don't go into any details, and just say he has gone to sleep but we watched the episode and all fell asleep. In the morning Nadia had a lot of questions about baby Charlie and what happened to him and where he went. I told her I didn't really pay too close attention because I was reading and I would have to watch it again but that I thought he went to Heaven. That night she wanted to watch it again, so we did, and she had to rewind it a couple times to try to figure out what happened and I tried to explain that sometimes we don't always have the answers. She still had questions like how did he get to Heaven? How long did it take him to get there? How long did it take baby Ella to get to Heaven? Why does everybody cry? Why do babies have to go to Heaven? Does anyone come back from Heaven? The next night we watched the next episode, which is "The Lord is my Shepard II" and in it Laura is having a hard time with Charlie's passing, as they all were, but she ran away and climbed a mountain to talk to God and ask to send Charlie back. 

Today we went strawberry picking and Ivy was picking flowers, her favorite thing to do. I overheard her as she was blowing on a dandelion "My wish is for baby Ella to come back." She said it a couple of times and I never let her know that I was listening. I smiled as I thought of the episode of Little House on the Prairie and the innocence of a child.