A Moment to Remember

A few weeks ago, Andy and I decided we should start prepping for winter by getting a few outside jobs done and putting away the outside patio set and toys. I also tried to tidy up a few things in the garage and make sure to take out anything we didn't want MICE to get at. (After last winter there was evidence that our garage had been a nice cozy hideaway for a mouse or two... or three or four...;)

A few items I decided shouldn't stay in the garage were the girls' roller blades. I set them outside for a bit and then put them in the closet by our back door for winter storage. I was confident I had got to them before the mice did.

The following week, the cold weather settled in a little bit, but we still enjoyed many beautiful days. One day before school, about mid-week, Gianna mentioned that she wanted to roller blade after school. She had not put on her roller blades since about mid-summer. Alas, she never did get around to rollerblading so her roller blades, along with Ella's, just continued to sit in our back closet, getting moved around a bit as we opened and closed the door to put recycling items away, pull out lunch boxes, and, perhaps, pull out the broom every now and then too.

A week later, the weekend brought out yet more nice weather and our days continued quite uneventfully... until about quarter to eleven that Saturday night...

Andy was finishing up some homework down in his office and came up to see if I was sleeping or not. As he was walking up the stairs he was completely startled by what appeared to be  an animal, emerge from under the open basement door that lies directly in front of the back closet and swoop up into the air... he rounded the corner into the kitchen and confirmed his fear, the flying animal was indeed a BAT, now flying freely upstairs while the rest of his family slept.

He retreated back downstairs as he tried to figure out what to do... he soon realized he was "it;" he was the one who would have to contend with the bat. His first thought was to have me close our bedroom door (he knew both of the kids doors were closed at night). To do this he tried calling me, twice. I didn't answer. I had heard my phone ring and saw Andy was calling me, but didn't bother to answer as I just thought he was being silly and calling me from downstairs to see if I was sleeping or not... and I had been for about 1/2 an hour.  After failing to get a hold of me, he decided his best weapon of defense was the top cover of a tub we had downstairs. With the plastic cover in hand, he proceeded back up the stairs and found the bat swooping back and forth between the dining area and the living room. He quickly went down the hallway and said with a little panic in his voice before abruptly closing the door, "there's a bat!!"  With that statement I shot up in bed and began full panic mode.

As my heart rate increased 10 fold, so did Andy's as he faced down the bat in the upstairs hallway. He whapped it with the cover and it went down on the hall rug. He then proceeded to open the bedroom door again to tell me he thought he had killed it. My mind was going a million miles a minute trying to think of how the heck we got a BAT in our house in mid-November!! I was freaking out. We had never seen (or heard) anything to ever indicate we had bats in our house, and now I felt like we had a million ready to come flying out at any time.

A few minutes later Andy had the bat picked up inside the rug and brought it outside. He threw it in our back wooded area, came back in, looked at the open closet, and had one question for me. "Did you shake out the roller blades before you brought them in the house?"  And that's when I realized, I had kept the MICE from nesting in the roller blades this coming winter, but I failed to keep them free from a BAT who had more than likely just settled in for a winter of hibernation and was inadvertently
woken up a week later when warm indoor temperatures could have given a hint of spring or his hiding place became disturbed with our actions inside the closet.

A little bit later, when I started questioning Andy about the possibility of contact with the bat and the possibility of rabies, both of which he was quite certain were not something to be concerned about, but appeasing my desire to have the bat tested anyway, he went to try and find the bat. To my dismay, however, it was gone... he concluded he must have just stunned it.

After a fairly restless night's sleep, Andy scoured our house from top to bottom in search of any other possible way a bat could have gotten into our house.  He couldn't find any obvious places. In light of this and his knowledge of where he saw the bat emerge, exactly where the roller blades were resting, (and because we remember all too well, my dad's story of a bat that settled into his ski boot he skied in and later found flapping around in his car!) we have concluded the bat came from one of the girls' roller blades.  The roller blades have since been removed from the house and we no longer have a rug in our hallway or a lid for one of our basement tubs... it is a night we both will soon not forget, the night we contended with a BAT in our house!!