Thursday, February 28, 2008

Great moments in parenting history

9am

"Dad, I've got friends coming to the house in 15 minutes and there's a squirrel dying right in front of our front door. What do I do?"

"Hit in with a shovel and put it in the trashcan."

"..."

"Or have them come in the back door."

**********

With a little gentle coersion from a broom, the squirrel slunk behind the snowshovel on our front porch and proceded to twitch for the next hour before finally succumbing sometime during Liza's dance lesson. I'm a little sad about it, because I have a feeling this was Gimpy, the squirrel who spent the whole summer walking instead of bounding. Nothing makes a squirrel look more rodent-like than walking. Stupid tree rats.

I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the mental image of me trying to whack a dying squirrel in the head with a snowshovel (which I didn't do), or the memory trying to pick up a frozen squirrel carcass with that same snowshovel (which I did ). And the whole time I was thinking, Dude, there's a vacant house in foreclosure right next door. You couldn't go die on their front porch?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dude, you've got a cat. The cat has been eyeing the squirrel for months. This could finally have been the cat's big chance to actually catch the squirrel.