Parenting Failure

Occasionally, I am wracked by guilt for taking pictures when I probably should have been taking some other sort of action. Take last weekend as an example...

We were at the WV place with Joey, our adorable little grandson. I wanted to take Joey to see our neighbor, Jean, Buddy's Mom. Just to prove that even I have brief periods of sanity, I realized it would be much safer to drive to Jean's house than risk having Joey fall off the very steep ridge we'd have to traverse if walking.

So I loaded Joey and the girls into the truck, and we went to visit Jean.

While Joey and I were visiting, the dogs were off playing. We heard some barks and went to see what the dogs were up to. That's when I saw this...

That's my cute little girlie-girl's butt sticking up out of the groundhog hole. The same one she'd explored a couple of weeks prior to no avail.

You can see that Buddy decided to join her down below. Keep in mind, I was standing atop an 8-foot creek bank with one very bashful toddler clinging to my hip as I clicked away.

If you look closely, you can see that Meg (rear-end visible at far left) joined the "hunt."

Meg soon lost interest. So did we. And we walked back to the house to resume our visiting.

All was going well, when the dogs suddenly started barking. A lot. In voices that said, "We found something."

So we walked back over to investigate.

"Oh, look," Jean said. "They did find something."

Yup. They'd actually routed out a groundhog. With that still-bashful toddler glued to my hip, I just HAD to get a picture.

"Buddy has been trying to catch that thing for years," Jean reported. Leave it to my not-so-girlie-girl!

Having trouble seeing the groundhog?

Is that better? He probably weighed about 10-12 pounds. My Tinkerbelle only weighs 25 pounds.

Just when I thought to myself, "I wonder what they'll do now," my cute little Tinkerbelle picked the thing up to violently shake the life out of it. But she didn't shake hard enough, apparently, because it clamped down on her ear.

I was faced with the option of plopping my cute, little, defenseless Joey down atop an 8-foot creek bank to rescue Belle or just screaming loudly to encourage Belle to extricate herself from what had become a pretty intense situation.

Look at the size of that thing clamped down on my baby girl's ear!

Know what I did? I screamed. It released her.

I thought all was okay...

Then I noticed Belle was bleeding. I raced back to the truck, with Joey still clinging. I called the dogs and they, being the good little girls they are, came running. I loaded everyone in and drove as quickly as I could back to the house.

Quick aside... I so wish I'd gotten a picture of Jean finishing off the not-quite-dead groundhog with a very large stick, but I was panicking. My baby girl was bleeding.

Wounds on dog ears are like wounds on people heads. They bleed a lot.

I was totally freaking out. All I could think of was getting Belle home so Hubby and I could assess the damage. When I got to the house, I unloaded Joey and rushed inside saying, "Belle got bit by a groundhog!"

Apparently ignoring the panic in my voice, Hubby nonchalantly replied, "Oh. She did?"

Then he saw Belle who by then was covered on the front, head to both feet, in blood.

"Oh my GOD!" Hubby said, quickly changing his tune.

We got Belle cleaned up pretty quickly. The cut on her ear was only about 1/4" long. It took a while to get the bleeding to stop, until we applied some pepper. It worked like a charm.

Here I am tending to my sweet little baby (aka Killer).

She's fine, by the way. The vet said her ear is healing nicely. He gave her a rabies booster, just in case, and some antibiotics.

Here's hoping this weekend is less eventful!