Smiling at the bucket

“I’ve been smiling at the bucket, why is the bucket not smiling back at me?” It was the three year old.
“Where is the mouth of the bucket? And its eyes? And forehead?”
“How can the bucket smile if it doesn’t have a mouth? Poor bucket. It doesn’t even have a mouth. It cannot smile at me.”

Smiling at an inanimate object and expecting it to smile back! Life seems to be so simple at that age. But is it really so? In his own way, isn’t he grappling with philosophical questions of a magnitude even we shy away from?