Ella's Food Chain

Ella has been slightly preoccupied with what animals eat. I have been trying to, appropriately, educate her about the food chain and that some animals eat smaller animals and other animals eat vegetation. This all began when she wanted to know why turtles have shells and we started with the explanation of the shell protecting from larger animals so they don't eat the turtle. She started calling these attackers "monsters" (which leads to an entirely separate discussion of monsters. How do you explain to your child that monsters are pretend when watching the news for one day will lend to a different reality?) I tried to explain that they aren't monsters, just hungry animals and that this is what the food chain is about. I tell you, it makes you look at things in a new light when you are teaching them to a child. Things we take for granted as just being they way they are- like the sun coming up, people getting sick, it being winter outside or needing to make money to live- they don't make a lot of sense when you are trying to answer the unanswerable "why?" of a child. Why do we have to work to have money? Wouldn't it be easier if we could just play all the time and have everything take care of itself?

Back to the animals. She asks what zebras eat. Grass (I think.). What do elephants eat? Grass again (I hope.). What do foxes eat? mice and small rodents. What do frogs eat? insects. What do tigers eat? Antelope (among other things- this I get from the Discovery Channel.)

Last night, out of the blue, she started asking me about the zebra diet again. Then she says, "And tigers eat cantelope, right?" I bet the antelope wish. Can you see the tigers in the produce department sniffing and pressing on the melon rind to check for ripeness while the antelope run free on the savannah?

A few minutes later, while I was playing some relaxing music to try to calm Maya through her last desperate hour before the Boob came home from work, we kept listening to the "Rainbow Connection" over and over again. Ella was singing out to the rafters about the "Rainbow Collection" and I thought again of how witty and fun a three-year-old is.