It's been a challenging few months mainly from a personal aspect for our family. In May my dear father-in-law passed suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving us all reeling from his loss. One of the hardest things I've had to do is tell my two children that their grandfather had died. How do you even begin to explain to a 6 and 3 yr old that the Poppa they cherished and spent a lot of time with was gone forever? How do you explain death in terms that a child is going to understand?
Even now 2 months on, they still ask why? How do you explain something that us ourselves still don't understand.
To assist us in chatting to our children about this very subject we turned to craft. My father-in-law had a couple of weeks in hospital a few months before he passed, and this led us to discussing the role of a nurse with our 6 yr old daughter Nikita.
On one of her visits to the hospital she watched the nurses go about their daily tasks. She was fascinated with the blood pressure machine and the other implements nurses use during their day.
This coincided with a new range of craft kits we'd just got in. Our DIY costumes from Villa Carton.
These costumes come pre-printed and ready to colour in and it so happened that they have a nurses costume, just perfect for our daughter to test for us.
We had a few hours to fill in one day so we sat down with the nurses costume and the markers and away we went. The whole time discussing the job that a nurse does. Nikita chatted about wanting to become a nurse and working in the hospital so that she could look after her Poppa.
The costume even had a badge for Nikita to write her name on it. Nurse Nikita. The colouring in of this costume took a good hour to do, and it was one of the better hours I've spent with her having a chat about Poppa being sick, and being in the hospital.
On her future visits to the hospital Nikita chatted with her Poppa about becoming a nurse and she proudly showed off her completed costume.Her Poppa was out of the hospital and on the road to recovery and when he passed it was sudden. Nikita is still a bit bewildered about it all, and hasn't spoken about becoming a nurse since. She's moved on to wanting to become a swim teacher, it's just unfortunate that there isn't a costume for that.
Our 3 yr old son Tyler is very matter of fact that Poppa isn't here anymore, and in time he won't remember much about Poppa, but dear blog world, I'm still left with the question, how do you explain..?
'Goodbye Poppa, we love you and we miss you'
