A Playdate at Blackrock

We had our friends Alyssa and Jodi and their two young sons over for dinner and boy play last night. Boy play, for those of you who are not familiar with the phenomena, is running around at full-speed, tackling each other in the grass, menacing each other's eyes with various implements, and a lot of other things that I, as a former little girl, totally do not get.

Whatever. They were having fun. Then, on one of their laps around the house, they discovered a baby bunny in the bushes. They made appropriate exclamations about how cute it was.

And then Leda the Fluffy Destroyer showed up. Oops.

She grabbed the baby rabbit and of course proceeded to kill it and eat it right there on the patio. With the children watching. I was inside and didn't know anything about it until Jodi and Alyssa brought their children in, visibly upset. The younger one was quite distraught and required some serious distraction in the form of the large toy box and its contents to calm him down. The older one was also upset, but shortly requested that he be allowed to go back outside. Because Cubby was still out there.

Oh yes. Not only was my son not bothered in the least by the killing and eating of the baby bunny, he actually refused to come inside, instead standing there with his hands clasped behind his back*, staring intently at Leda eating the rabbit. He informed A. he wanted to "watch her eat it all the way down."

Yeah. That's . . . kind of embarrassing.

Luckily, Jodi and Alyssa know us and our lifestyle pretty well and they grew up around here themselves, so they didn't pack their kids up and take them away from this house of horror. They might even bring them back to play some other time.

We'll just make sure the dogs are locked up.

* He does this because I have explained that if he bothers the dogs while they're eating some prey they killed, they might think he's trying to take it away from them and bite him. Not that I really think they would, but it's always good to be overly cautious about these things.