a tragic tale

My mom sent us an inflatable baby pool for Bo to use on these hot summer days.  We've had some rain recently so I had to wait until the end of last week before the pool party could happen.  One of my friends brought her little boy over and the guys enjoyed the water - Jeremy more than Bo since he can sit up and stack cups and play and all that.  But it was still pretty cute!  After going through all the work of putting up the pool, I decided to leave it out to use the next day.  I left the water in it because I didn't want it to blow away at night.

After Bo went down for his nap on Saturday morning, I went outside to change the water in the pool and let it warm up so we could use it that afternoon.  As I approached the pool, I noticed a large piece of bark floating in the water along with leaves and flower bits.  I knelt to fish it out of the pool and realized, to my absolute horror, that it was not a piece of bark.  It was an animal.  A squirrel had drowned in our baby pool.  

I immediately felt SICK and oddly close to hysterics and ran over to Matt, who was mowing nearby.   I didn't know whether to laugh or cry as I screeched the news.  Matt fished it out with a couple pieces of firewood and determined it wasn't a squirrel, it was a chipmunk.  Now THAT made me really sad, because we have a little chipmunk that lives in a hole near where I park the car and he always dashes about so cutely on the brick wall.  Poor buddy.  I really wish you hadn't defiled our brand new baby pool.

My first instinct was to just throw the whole pool out but Matt assured me it could be saved . . . so I spent the morning disinfecting it with all of the cleaning products I could find.  BLEH.  

We didn't tell Bo about the tragic end to the chipmunk; we didn't want him to feel badly about it.  

Check out that six-pack.

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You can't really tell, but he's yelling "It's COLD!" in this picture.

We got him out when his feet turned purple. :)