Sandpit Evacuation

Note: This post was orignally written on Friday evening but was not published because I was in a hurry to leave. I thought I did but have only just found out that it didn't appear on the blog at all. Blogger was probably not working properly or something.

Bree and I were ‘evacuated’ from her sandpit for a second time this week, today. A mysterious feline had left another surprise, carefully hidden under the sand. This time, I found it while I was inspecting the sand with Bree’s toy rake. I immediately covered up the sandpit again and this made Bree very upset. She loves the sandpit and couldn’t understand why she was not allowed to use it again. The whole thing turned into a full-scale temper tantrum. She refused to come into the laundry to pick up a plastic bag for the removal of the ‘offensive material’ and kept wandering back to lift up the cover. She had to come with me because I couldn’t leave her to explore the sandpit whilst I ducked into the laundry. She then decided that she needed to take the toy rake from my hand. I couldn’t give it to her because it had touched the cat poo and I had to clean and disinfect it properly. Suggestions to do something else were offered but all she wanted was the sandpit. We eventually ended up back in the house. Once she calmed down, I offered her my pack of threading spools. She spent more than half an hour trying to thread them using the plastic tubing. Great concentration! It was only when she was napping that I got my opportunity to remove the cat poo and to wash & disinfect the toy rake.

On Monday, Bree jumped into the sandpit as soon as I took the cover off. She absolutely refused to wait for me to inspect it first. I was still trying to place the sandpit cover under the slide when I saw Bree picking up something that didn’t look quite like a clump of wet sand. Upon closer inspection, I realised it was cat poo. There was also the tell tale smell. I told her to let go and shook her arm to encourage her to release it from her grip. Bree obviously sensed that I didn’t approve of what was going on and dropped it. The confused look on her face was a clear indication that she was unaware of the reason of my disapproval. As I scooped her up to wash her hands in the laundry, I tried to explain what went wrong. She agreed too that it was ‘Yuck!’ LOL. As a clean freak, I even took her t-shirt and shorts off in the laundry! I am absolutely afraid of Toxoplasmosis!

When Bree’s dad found out what happened on Monday evening, he removed at least the top half of the sand and topped it up again with new bags of sand. Bree’s dad was talking about buying more sand this weekend because there wasn’t quite enough. After finding out what happened again today, he gave up. Apparently, Monday’s incident wasn’t the first time. He had repeated the same procedure on two other occasions and after the first time Bree’s mum bought the tarpaulin to cover it. The tarpaulin didn’t do an adequate job because it was not designed to fit properly and it was not tied down snugly to prevent the cat from going underneath it. A cat used to visit the backyard but we have not seen it for more than 6 months because the family has moved away. Someone must have acquired a new cat since Christmas.