The other day I found myself sitting by the train table while N was playing with the trains. It was just the two of us, and he was alternating between playing trains and making me dinner.

He loves to “cook” for me – laying out little plastic plates and describing what’s on each one.

This time, however, he got a little sidetracked. After rummaging around in the box of plastic kitchen stuff, he came out with a large blue plastic fish in one hand and a little red plastic ladybug in the other. He looked at them for a minute, as if surprised to see that he was holding them. Then the ladybug bit the fish.

He laughed and made it happen again.

The second time, however, something went wrong. Suddenly, my little two year old became very serious. He carried the two toys over to me. “Daddy, will you talk with him?”

I was as confused as you are now. “Why?”

“He was eating his eye. That’s mean!”

“Okay.” I talked very seriously to the ladybug, explaining that eating eyes is not a nice thing at all.

After I was finished, he held the lady bug up to the fish and said “Can I eat your eye? Is that okay?”

Then he held up the fish. “Mmmm… Okay!”

…and he wandered off watching the ladybug eat the fish’s eye.

I have to admit I was a little disgruntled. If I’d known the two of them were going to be able to work it out, I wouldn’t have wasted such a great speech on the dangers of eating eyes.