Veteran's Day - "Fighting for America"

Well, I haven't caught up yet, but I wanted to tell a funny story about T and Veteran's Day.

Last year I took the boys down to a small town in Oregon (Mollala or maybe Milwaukee, I didn't write about it then so I can't actually remember!) because that town was doing a Veteran's day parade and having a ceremony to honor veterans. It was a small parade, but the ceremony which involved a fly over and a gun salute to honor the town's fallen soldiers were poignant experiences (for me at least, its hard to know how much my then 3 and 5 year old boys got from it).

This year, I am still fairly nauseated and generally tired from being pregnant so we didn't do anything too big, but T made a flag in preschool that said, "Thank you Veterans!" and he hung it in our front window. I tried to make a point to talk to him about Veterans over the last couple days. I was pretty proud of how into it he was. Then, tonight, T told Ry about his flag and he said, "This is for the Veterans who fight for America. We live in America, this flag tells them to go away and stop fighting for America!"... Hmmm, I guess fighting "for" America and fighting "for" our freedom can also be intepreted as trying to take something away instead of defending it. Oops! If he hadn't said that to Ryan, I wouldn't have ever realized he misunderstood what we were talking about.

The funny thing is, we did talk about being thankful to Veterans etc, but you never know what a 4 year old is going to take away from what you say - I wonder what other funny ideas he has floating around in his cute little head!