(c) 2008 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com
Last night, at about 2:18 am, Pumpkin woke up (and woke me up) with a bad dream. I went in, we chatted about it, and I turned her relaxing music on to help her sleep. I went back to bed and fell immediately back asleep.
At about 2:50 am, I woke up, hearing a strange noise, sort of a soft "fletfletfletfletflet." I groggily opened my nearly-legally-blind eyes to figure out what in the blazes it was. I mean, we've got no a/c in this old house, so we get some strange noises from outside on occasion.
This noise, however, was coming from inside the house.
Inside our room.
Flying around the ceiling, in fact.
If you guessed, "Oh! It's a bat!", you'd be concurring with my own sleepy brain, which (fairly quickly, considering the hour) put the "fletfletflet" together with the small, fast, dark (blurry) shadow looping around close to the ceiling and came up with the flying nocturnal mammal, too.
I quietly woke up Mr. Kluges, and after a whispered conference, he hopped out of bed to take the window fan out and close the door so the bat could find its way out of our room without getting into the rest of the house. However, once he did that, I no longer heard the "fletflet" or saw the looping shadow, with or without glasses.
"Hm, it must have gotten out into the hallway right before he got the door closed," was my reaction. So I tiptoed out of our room, listening carefully, and crept downstairs.
In the dining room was the small, dark, looping shadow and by-now-tell-tale noise. Not wanting it to get back upstairs where my children (and spouse) were sleeping, I crouched down (Why? Um, not that I was afraid of it getting in my hair, but I didn't want my not-really-so-tall, sort-of-looming form to send it flying out the other door, I guess.), pushed the French doors closed and took the adjustable screen out of the window right next to them, leaving a 2'x3' gaping hole to the outside.
(This was all sans-lights, by the way.)
Then I crawled over to the kitchen door and closed that one, too. Looking up at the ceiling, I was reassured that the bat was still in the dining room, so I crawled out the kitchen door, then went around to peek in the French doors.
The bat appeared to be looping around very close to the open window and the French doors. In fact, at one point, it zoomed so close to the French doors that I involuntarily flinched backwards.
When I looked again, I couldn't see the looping shadow anymore. Hoping it had made it out the window, but not wanting to open either door and possibly let it into the rest of the house, I left things as they were and tiptoed back up to bed...
...where the residual adrenaline and nervous energy made it a tad bit harder to fall back to sleep this time.
7 comments:
When I still lived at home, we used to get bats all the time (I swear bats get maps with directions to the holes in old houses!) and my BRAVE cats would protect me ... by burrowing under the covers. They were (and are) the biggest bunch of weenies ever to walk the earth!
You are crazy to let the guy keep sleeping!! Glad you fixed the French door window.
Oh my gosh! Nectarine, I never even thought about the fact that Mr. Kluges had only recently fixed that missing window pane! Dang, am I ever glad he did now!
I actually like bats. I think they're cool. If I could potty train them not to poop on the house, then we'd be square. Since they won't learn though, I'll have to relocate them.
Yeah, like the work they do, not a fan of the rabies. My brother did the full course of rabies vaccination due to a bat bite. You really do want to keep them out of the house and away from the kids.
Old Houses = Bats. I vividly remember my dad and brothers trying to chase a bat out of our house when I was pretty young with a tennis racket. And naturally, my sister and I were laying on the floor covering our hair! Time to build some bat houses outside!
I think bats are pretty cool, too, though I can see that anything flapping around in your house in the middle of the night would not be exactly welcome. Good job on sending it on it's way gently. When I was in university, we once found on hanging asleep on a curtain. We bundled it up, called the bio department to figure out how to release it, and were told to let it out at dusk, so that is what we did.
Post a Comment