Creatures of the Deep

My middleman had three friends over on Friday. After the furious, unforgiving tornadoes in the area last week, this day's gorgeous weather was a welcome change. The boys headed out the back door to the pond. They stripped to their underdrawers and dove in.

After an hour and a half of mayhem and fun...

I yelled for them to come in so we could get going to a ball game. Dane jumped in the shower. Mason, my oldest, came upstairs and calmly said, "Uh, Mom. Dane says he can't go because he has leeches." Say again...

I knocked on the bathroom door and asked to be let in, not likely with a 12-year-old boy, but surprisingly the door opened. Uh oh. Sure enough, LEECHES! I don't recall anything in the Mom Job Description about LEECHES!

He explained that he had already removed a 2" one from underneath his, well, ummm... you get the idea. He still had bazillions of teeny, tiny leeches on his hands and pretty much everywhere around the underwear region! We worked at picking them off his hands for a few minutes when an idea dawned and I said, "Lather up, let's see if we can sufficate these little dudes!" Whew, it worked!

I went up stairs to break the incredible news to the other boys. Did you happen to hear them screaming? To assuade the look of panic on one boy's face I said something like "In the old days, medical professionals used leeches for medicinal purposes." Confusing them as a distraction is usually a good technique. One of the boys found a one and one-half incher between his toes and yelled, "GET. IT. OFF!" Thankfully that one was the lone ranger among these three boys.

Now then, let's just put this little encounter with leeches, behind us...full body shudder.