I won't post the photo of the roadkill

The weather was nice enough yesterday that we were able to go to the park to get out some of our cooped up energy. As I was buckling Kate into her car seat Dylan yelled to me from the front yard to come see what he had found. He had been playing on a mound of snow and had discovered a dead squirrel. Umm. Let me say that again, he was showing me a dead squirrel. I'm assuming the plow truck had pushed it onto our snow bank or Sean had unknowingly shoveled it into the pile. This squirrel was obviously roadkill, he was flat with blood all over his face and he must have been there a while, only to be revealed by the big melt.

Well, shit. How do I explain this to a three-year-old? I played it off like it was no big deal as I led him to the car. How cool! A squirrel! Let's get to the park, shall we? and of course Dylan asked what the squirrel was doing there.

"He's sleeping," I told him, "He must like the cold! Let's not bother him. You didn't touch him, did you? Because we shouldn't touch wild animals. Plus you don't want to wake him up."

Dylan seemed to buy it and was soon asking to hear his new favorite "dung beetles" song, which is actually Ever Present Past by Paul McCartney of the BEATLES, not by the dung beetles.

So we went to the park.








Sean brought my mother to the airport this morning--she's going to California to see the new grandbabies--and then stopped home to pick up our trash to take to the dump on his way to work. I asked him to get rid of that squirrel if he could so that Dylan didn't see it again. Sean moaned a bit and then put him in the trash bag and popped it in the back of his car. He joked, "I don't think I want chicken quesadillas tonight after all. And now I've gotta ride to work with that thing!"

For some reason dead squirrel humor makes me laugh so hard. I'm saddened by it because squirrels are adorable and so I disguise my sadness with comic relief. I had taken a picture of the squirrel yesterday to show him but had forgotten to send it along. So this afternoon I texted that picture to Sean with a caption that said,

"Thanks for picking me up! -Squirrel"