Bringing up boys: There’s a squirrel dead on the ice…

It struck me today as I watched the tail of a dead squirrel slip below the surface of the melting ice that perhaps there is too much sense and not enough sensibility in my home.

Perhaps this is because I have a male household rather than one full of Sylvanian Families, pink fluffy tutus and Cath Kidson coats with matching wellies. Not that  I would have allowed anything of the sort in my home even if I had had daughters, I can’t stand the colour pink and cute little bunnykin families are a no no and always have been for me. But there is a wistfulness when I go to other people’s homes and see all this girlishness. I think a little bit of pink would not go amiss.

I mean isn’t it rather alarming when your 7 year old and four and a half year old sons decide to name the Christmas dinner Oscar? And proceed to raise a toast to his demise totally unprompted at the Christmas table?

We go to the butchers and they quite happily bounce up to the displays and chatter about the hens we keep and say things like: “Would Mrs Brown look like that if we killed her?” which of course must be alarming to any Mrs Brown’s in the queue behind.

I am not saying my children are unkind in any way they are not but they see things very practically hence their rather gung ho attitude towards the chickens and perhaps towards the squirrel on the ice in the middle of the moat.

None of us had noticed it before and we have no idea how it got there and we would not have noticed it if Bog Boy had not brought it to our attention: “There’s a squirrel, dead on the ice.”

Me: “Really?”

Bog Boy: “Yes, look it’s dead.”

I looked myopically at it lying there quite still, apparently dead.

Me: “Are you sure it’s dead?”

Bog Boy: “Yes, it’s quite dead I saw it get deaded.”

I looked at my youngest incredulously knowing full well that if I had seen a squirrel die in front of me at his age I would have screamed and hollered for someone to save it. Not so my practical son.

Me: “Why didn’t you say so?”

Bog Boy just shrugged: “We don’t like squirrels they eat the baby birds.”

I had a feeling that for my youngest that the death of the squirrel was a kind of retribution for the damage its species wreaks on others.

Bog Boy: “And anyway no one can go in the ice now you said, so it had to die.”

He was quite right the dying squirrel could not have been rescued even if we had wanted to without one of us coming to grief for the ice could not have held anyone’s weight but it got me thinking.

And every time I looked out the window over the past few days and seen the squirrel lying there, I’ve thought more and more: Boys and girls are wired different…