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Encouraging Heroes. You can be one too.

Okay, I just remembered another funny from the past. When The Manager and Captain Earthquake were 2, we got them one of those cute little plastic pools too splash in. Being that we live in an area where mosquitoes can be a concern, I tend to avoid standing water. So I usually dumped the pool out each night and refilled the next day. This was a winning situation for all of us. What boy doesn’t love playing with the hose?

One afternoon, I was in the kitchen and sent them out to play in the back yard where I could watch them from the window. They had the hose on and I knew they’d stay right there for me while I finished the dishes.  My brother-in-law (a landscaper) had been out to regrade the yard after a major flood the previous year and half the yard was grass-free. In other words….all dirt.  The hose wasn’t going to reach that far, so I didn’t worry about them getting muddy.

When I got outside I was a bit dismayed to see that a lot of that dirt had made its way into the pool, and the boys were splashing around in it having a wonderful time. Turns out TechnoBoy and a neighbor had scooped a bunch of dirt into two buckets and had lugged them up where the littles could get into it.

I was all “Oooh, yucky. Let Mama rinse out the pool and get all that yucky water out of there. Ewwwww, we don’t keep dirt in our pool.” Then I commenced rinsing.

There was quite a pile of dirt in the grass, and I already had the hose running so I figured I’d just rinse the dirt right down into the grass rather than try and scoop it up.

The dirt was washing away pretty well, but about half of it was left when I realized that it wasn’t dirt. It was a whole pile of rabbit droppings. And my boys had been splashing and playing and drinking that water.

Can we all say it together? Ewwwwwwwww!

The good news is they survived, although I did investigate whether or not it was possible to disinfect someone from the inside out. (It’s not).   I also called the neighbor to alert her that her son had been unintentionally scooping rabbit droppings and that she may want to scrub him asap.

I threw in a quick droppings identification lesson before bedtime that night.

Earnest Parenting: advice for parents of gross toddlers.

Photo courtesy of another sergio, via Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.