Swings and Popsicles

So, we had another deep conversation today while at the playground. This is almost a daily occurrence for us. But today I thought I'd try to record some of it. It started with Grace asking about the sun. We were at one of the little parks in our subdivision and it was a perfect day, 70 degrees and bright blue sky. Grace started asking science questions about the sun. She doesn't understand how you can see the same sun from anywhere. She wanted to know if it was dark at the beach while it was light here, because if the sun is here with us then it wouldn't be at the beach too. We've tried to explain how the earth rotates and causes night and day and how the sun is so big you can see it from anywhere on the earth. She keeps asking the same questions though, just in different ways. Eric loves to get our kid science books out and go through all of that stuff with them. But, that lead to questions about heaven. I think it was because Lyla asked if God was in the clouds. Then Grace always goes into the talk about why people die and go to heaven. She asked if mommies die before their kids and if I would die before her. It sounds very morbid, but she is really just very curious and intrigued by heaven and the whole subject. We have a family friend that died a couple years ago from muscular dystrophy and she still talks about him all the time. Today she was wondering why God made Joseph have the disease that caused him to die. She made the connection that God makes all of us and that Joseph was born with the disease that ultimately caused him to die. So, the question came of why did God make Joseph have that disease. So, I tried to talk about how God sees things differently than we do. How God knows how much better heaven is than what we have here on Earth and that He knows it's better to be in heaven than Earth. So He doesn't see death as a bad thing like we do. So then she asked what is heaven like. I told her that we don't know exactly but we do know that we'll be able to recognize each other. So then her response was, and this is the line I wanted to remember, "Maybe heaven will have swings and popsicles". Grace is so good at recognizing a beautiful day. She always acknowledges the beautiful weather and sky. She's great at reminding me to stop and "smell the roses". I can't believe she's going to school in the fall!!!!