Play dates, end of summer, learning to ride a bike wipe-outs, it was inevitable.

The girls had a morning play date with some friends and I heard four words that made me throw up in my mouth just a little.

“I lost my scab.” Barf.

I don’t know what it is about the word “scab” that makes  it one of the uglier words in the English language but the idea of a clump of someone’s dried blood, lost, in my house, now that’s gross.

The poor kid who lost his scab was suffering both from the loss but also from the wound he was now re-living, twice scarred. Maybe it was the missing scab exposing an open wound and therefore fresh blood or the unnecessary repetition of the word scab, but I was beginning to feel woozy.

I feel this way when someone asks me to wipe their child’s nose or change their baby’s dirty diaper. When it’s not your brand, it’s just plain disgusting.

I can’t recite the words to Fiona Lewis’s Keep Bleeding nor can I jump into a conversation the girls are having involving death because they always come back to someone bleeding out and while they have no problem carrying on with their game of Connect Four, I have to excuse myself to take a few deep breaths into a paper bag.

Tonight on our family walk/bike ride, Ellie stopped to have a moment of silence for a dead frog at the side of the road. She asked me to move him off the road so another car wouldn’t hit him and there was no way I could say no to those intensely sympathetic blue eyes.

I found a leaf or, what I thought was a leaf but turned out to be the torn piece of a plastic bag, presumably, someone’s dog poop bag and I attempted to flick the frog off to the side of the road. Yuck. I looked to Ellie for strength and I pushed the frog with the feces bag.

His head fell off, body stuck to the hot pavement. This day just keeps getting better.