Molly, my 4 year old, found it too scary. She stayed downstairs playing Chutes And Ladders on the computer while my wife and I watched the coverage. Emma, my 8 year old, shuttled between the computer and the TV. She thought it was cool. And, really, who could blame her? It was TV. It was unreal. Every morning she watches shows about flying dragons and talking cats. Now she's watching planes flying through buildings and buildings collapsing to the ground.

In a purely visual sense, it was cool. Hollywood could not have planned a better day to film against. The sky, before the dust, smokes and flying debris, was a brilliant blue. Some of the shots of the plane flying into the second tower are breathtaking. The sky looks almost digitally blue. It points up the orange and black of the explosion and the flames. It looks so perfect it can't be real. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem real. After all, we've seen the White House destroyed by aliens. And Hoover Dam, too.

"Why don't they have more firemen putting out the fires?"

She doesn't quite get it. I ask her if she remembers seeing the Hancock building downtown and to try to imagine a fireman with a hose in front of it. She ponders this for a moment and then goes back downstairs to play Chutes and Ladders.

Even though the explosions are cool, she does not like the videos of the people running in the street. She pulls the blanket over her head or runs downstairs. I'm not sure she's really making the connection; not really understanding that those people are running from the cool explosions.
I wince every time they run the replay and an awed "wooowwwww" escapes her lips. There's a part of me that wants to explain the magnitude of this carnage. To link the cool explosions and the number of people that they killed. I want to debunk this vision of this being just another TV show. I can't tell how much she's actually processing.

Later in the day, she builds two stacks out of the big Duplo blocks.
"These are those towers," she grins, and then kicks them across the floor and beats on them.

But does she really understand? Should I put the little Playmobile people inside them to drive the point home? Should I pull the ketchup out of the fridge and pretend that it's blood? Should I light a cigarette and blow smoke over the whole proceedings?

Probably not. She's 8. There's sure to be plenty of time to talk about man's inhumanity to man. For now, I might as well let her take from the situation what she wants.

They are just cool explosions.