Please Don't Eat Your Brother's Body Parts!

There are so many things you may hear around our home, what with 3 young girls running about. At any given time you might catch one or the other of us parents chiding our children about the messes in their rooms, the papers strewn about on the floor, the door left open.
In the everyday moments of life, how mundane these comments are. Charlotte has surely heard hundreds of times,"Please bring me your kit," when we are attempting to get her blood sugar. And Eden,"Those are tights, not pants, please put a skirt on or change your bottoms," when she is dressing in the morning. Gretchen must get asked, "Do you want help or have you got it?" a dozen times daily.
But there are a few things we have caught ourselves saying to the kids that might seem strange if you heard them out of context. "Don't lick your sister, you are not a dog," or the ever popular but thankfully infrequently needed,"Did someone really poop in the tub or is that potty talk?"
Recently though, a dear friend brought a precious gift to us while out to lunch. Our son's hand and foot had been molded the day he was born and our friend had them 3D scanned and printed, thus preserving his likeness (well of those two body parts anyway) in plastic that the girls could handle without my being worried about breaking the molds. It was during the lunch, at a very public restaurant, that I found myself saying to my 2-year old the oddest thing in recent memory, "Please don't eat your brother's body parts!," as she was lightly gnawing on the edge of a foot or hand, I can't now recall. I sighed, collected those little toes and fingers, promptly stuffed them into a leftover sock that was in my pocket from one of the older girls, and put the sock full of body parts in my purse.
The strangeness of this wasn't lost on me at the time, though noone at the table or any of them around us seemed interested in my commentary, and I am slowly finding a 'new normal' to these things I might once have considered odd. Just as before children entered into my life I never would have expected to say,"What are you eating? Hmm, we haven't had that for a week, wonder where you found it?", I am now letting slip requests like, "Can we stop pulling Griffin's hair in the car?" and "I think you carried him on the way into the store, can your sister take a turn?," all in reference to my daughters playing with their dead baby brother.

Shall I say that I am enjoying it while I can without seeming too morose? They are enjoying him as best they can and keeping him present in my life in this way. It isn't every day that they choose to bring him along on an adventure but my ears perk up when they do. And as for his replicated body parts, maybe I will have to change my tune...pull them out of their hiding place and leave them around the house. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to have to remind them every now and again not to bite him. We no doubt would have been saying similar things to a living son and you know what, probably some stranger things than that!