The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Ursula Hennessey ·
Oct 25, 2010 at 10:32am
How will I break it to the 6-year-old when she comes home from school?
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May '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
...but Mommy will buy you a new one! And then we'll roast pumpkin seeds!
Jun '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Consider youself lucky. Where I live, a very urban area, Black Bears are the most common unwelcome backyard intruder.
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
How to turn this into a "teachable moment." Get the kids b-b guns and teach them to shoot? Tell them to fill out form 239-P and the government will reimburse them for their loss. Or...tell them that squirrels gotta eat, too.
Aug '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Notify your 6 year old that Agent Oso had a special mission regarding Jack O Lanterns, and that he wasn't very successful. You and your six year old need to do another one.
Or...
Talk about how these things aren't permanent and how raccoons/squirrels might like to eat them, then make another one with the 6 year old. You could even joke about how the backyardigans had some home made "jack o lantern pie."
The child would have witnessed the Lantern rotting over the next few weeks anyway, so preserving the perception of permanency isn't necessarily the highest goal here.
Though if your goal is to avoid a sense of loss. It could have gone to join the Great Pumpkin.
May '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Honey... Nancy Pelosi smashed your pumpkin which is we never, ever, vote for Democrats...
Sep '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
If you still have time till she comes home, run down to the grocery store, get a new one and reproduce the face. Your child shall never find out... (You might want to get rid of that old pumpkin in your neighbor's garbage can.)
Otherwise, you're screwed.
May '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
He was convicted of numerous Thought Crimes, and thus was punished with the Rat Mask.
Jul '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
In order of decreasing "greeness":
- The wonders of the natural world at your doorstep. Maybe if we watch for it, it will come back for seconds.
- The animals do this because they can't help it. We, as humans, have to be smarter than them to do what we wish and to keep them safe at the same time.
- Found good bait for the raccoon trap! Pumpkin-fed critter: there's good eatin'!
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
The pumpkin got sick and threw up. That's what it looks like.
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Okay, okay. I should fess up. Several weeks ago, my husband was hurling acorns at a tree in our backyard for target practice (alternately known as "I never gave up on my dream to be Dave Righetti.") Absentmindedly or on purpose, I'll never know (and probably don't want to know), he nailed a squirrel in the haunch. The squirrel jumped up, shook it off, but didn't move from his spot. Today, he got his revenge.
Sep '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Tell her David Cronenberg stopped in for a visit.
Jun '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Tell her this is why God invented cats.
Aug '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
I assume that your suburb would frown upon the use of .22 short. Failing that the new pellet guns are pretty powerful. I had my first gun at four or five years old. We lived in the city limits of a town of maybe 80thousand. Rabbits and squirrels were regularly dispatched within a large backyard. Of course, we had to learn how to clean them and then eat them occasionally.
To date myself, it didn't hurt that I mostly wore a coonskin cap all the time because Davey Crockett was my hero. And they do qualify as varmints.
Or is that one of those new gubernatorial candidates in New York ?
Sep '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Dog will get you for that, ~Paules.
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Update: 6-year-old's reaction, with quivery lip:
"Why didn't it eat Patrick's pumpkin instead?"
Sigh. So much for sibling love.
Jun '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Pseudodionysius
Dog will get you for that, ~Paules. · Oct 25 at 12:26pm
Ain't it just like a cat to volunteer the dog goes first.
Aug '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Ursula Hennessey: Update: 6-year-old's reaction, with quivery lip:
"Why didn't it eat Patrick's pumpkin instead?"
Sigh. So much for sibling love. · Oct 25 at 12:51pm
We all appreciate that you didn't go and deface the other pumpkin in advance to "level the playing field". Pretty sure there some rulings within the DOJ about girls' pumpkins getting wrecked, but only girl's pumpkins.
Aug '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Tell her that the pumpkin on the right did it. Demonic possession. Clearly demonic possession.
Jul '10
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
This reminds me of the first time I took my wife - an ultra-city girl, camping.
We were way out in the wilderness, on our own. In the middle of the night, a racket arose outside our tent. Terrified, she sent me out with my pistol and a flashlight.
There, on top of a boulder where we'd left some of our food containers, were two teams of squirrels - common ground squirrels working in concert with red squirrels - busily chewing through bags and pushing containers to the ground in hopes that they would burst open.
Man, if only welfare recipients worked half as hard as those squirrels....
Re: The Downside of Suburbia: Gnawing Backyardigans
Kenneth: This reminds me of the first time I took my wife - an ultra-city girl, camping.
We were way out in the wilderness, on our own. In the middle of the night, a racket arose outside our tent. Terrified, she sent me out with my pistol and a flashlight.
There, on top of a boulder where we'd left some of our food containers, were two teams of squirrels - common ground squirrels working in concert with red squirrels - busily chewing through bags and pushing containers to the ground in hopes that they would burst open.
Man, if only welfare recipients worked half as hard as those squirrels.... · Oct 25 at 2:22pm
I must add, in defense of your wife, that scritchy-scratchy, leaf-crunching sounds outside of a tent on a dark night -- to a city gal -- are somehow magnified 100 fold. In other words, I would not have blamed your wife if she thought you'd stumbled upon Big Foot himself based on the movement of squirrels.