Come, let me gently stroke your lifeless feathers.

My kids are masters at entertaining one another.  Don’t get me wrong, they have their super clingy moments… but now that it’s nice out they’ll spend hours in the backyard just moving dirt from one place to another (I’m convinced there’s some super fun angle to the game I’m just not aware of yet) and since the yard is all walled in so they can’t escape all I have to do is poke my head out every few minutes or check on them through the kitchen window to make sure one of the new dirt locations isn’t an oraphis in someone.

This afternoon while they put dirt on each other’s heads and giggled I used the opportunity to make my house look less like a disaster zone, until Verona walked in cuddling with a new special friend.

Yep.  A dead bird.

Now I am not the germaphobic mom… not by a long shot… I think running around like a half naked dirty little monster for the first couple years of your life is the way it should be.  I even consider the 5 second rule germaphobic, in our house we have the “If I remember how it got there you can probably eat it” rule instead.

But even so, there are some lines that just cannot be crossed… and carrying corpses into my house is one of them.  I threw up in my mouth a little bit and my one eye started twitching uncontrolably, but I wrestled all of that down and I kept it cool, didn’t freak out, and said “Ah, a dead bird.  We need to go wash your hands… like a bazillion times.  So go put it back outside please.” in the best not-freaking-out voice I could muster.

But instead of going and laying it back on the ground outside like I meant…

It’s tiny bird body sailed through the air in slow motion, wings and head contoring in horrifying angles, until it hit the ground with the most horrifying thud.  I let out a long, drawn out note in my crazy opera voice because, for whatever bizarre reason that seems to be my default freakout noise.  With that toss Verona crushed not only that dead animals tiny bones, it also crushed my ability to keep not losing my shit.

When things get crazy I get weird… specifically I sing weird things about what’s going on in the afore-mentioned giant crazy opera voice.  Seriously,  it’s weird.  I can’t explain it.  But it was on.

and sometimes random phrases on one single high pitches note,

as I led the kids to the bathroom (them staring at me like I’d totally lost it the entire way) where I started to throw them in the bath but after a short vision of them sitting in stagnant dead bird ick threw them in the shower instead.  Then covered them in about half a bottle of body wash each and gave them the shower head to play with while I went and called the west nile virus hotline.

On the upside, (at least I think it’s an upside because it smells better than bird death) in my crazy freak out state I used David’s body wash instead of the baby soap because I figured it’s meant to handle man sized messes… or something like that… so after marinating it in for half an hour the whole back part of my house smells like man land and my kids smell like tiny frat boys who bathed in Axe before hitting the club.