Our breakfast cereal is narrated by the morning news while the Girl is dripping honey down the front of her pajamas. But then such a mess is nothing compared to usual coverage of overseas protests, international economics, and local traffic reports that have been following a late-night snow on the already icy streets.

It’s only a bit of honey after all, but: “Daddy.” She bleats. “Oh! *gasp* No!” And an exasperated and futile attempt to wipe the spill with fingers even stickier than the mess itself ensues.

“It’s just your pajamas. Wait.” I sigh, pulling a damp cloth from the nearby sink and — smudging-more-than-cleaning — dab the honey from the cartoon visage of some Disney princess emblazoned in fleece fabric. “Wait. Stop touching it.”

“In Syria today,” the news informs us “twelve protesters are confirmed dead after…”

Lately, my mind flutters with a variety of philosophical thoughts related to the parsing of complex language and complex ideas. How much can a kid really understand and how much more can they comprehend? What do they get out of things that they hear? Anecdotally, the art of reading stories aloud and observing the reactions of a little girl I know oh-so-well has revealed to me a definite threshold of understanding: there is a line in the snow — marked by a speed of my talking, the number of syllables in words and sentences and the density and abstraction of the concepts being read — where-after I may as well be reciting everything in pig-Latin for all the comprehension that is going on. But that line is increasingly more vague and more distant.

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