It's a bird! It's a plane!

I was relating the earlier events of the bug-that-wasn't to Hubby about 20 minutes ago.

Not five minutes after I finished with the tale, I heard blood-curdling, 100% gen-yoo-wine screams from upstairs.  "Honey, somebody's crying upstairs again!"  I didn't wait for him to stop his episode of DS9 and follow along; I knew he would, just from the sound.

I got upstairs and Medium was freaking out.  "Dewre was a biwrdie in hewre!  It was flyin' awound!"

I glanced around the room.  Nothing.  No sound to indicate a bird or other flying thing.  I wondered if somehow she'd dropped straight into REM sleep, came awake enough to open her eyes, and thought one of the bluebird decals on the wall was a real bird.

"There's no bird," I said firmly.

"Yes, dewre is!  I sawl it!"

I couldn't convince her otherwise.

I was going to call Hubby, because I clearly needed backup, when I heard his footsteps in the hall.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"She says there was a bird flying around their room, and I..."

He started to go into the twins' room and got as far as saying, "There's no--" when I put my hand on his arm to stop him.

"Honey."  I pointed to the top of the pocket doorway to the stairs, where there was something brown that did not belong there.

Hi there.

A bat.

Okay, I thought, I am sorry I didn't believe my child.

I went in to do the care and comfort thing.  "Sweetie," I said to Medium Fry, after grabbing my camera and documenting our little winged guest, "it was just a little baby bat."

Hubby got one of the kids' butterfly nets, and closed Large Fry's door and our bedroom door.  I closed the twins' door and stayed in there with them.

We could hear the bat squeaking unhappily as Hubby tapped on the molding, hoping to get the stubborn little thing to move on out.

No such luck.

He'd decided he rather liked the crevice of our pocket door, and was disinclined to acquiesce to Hubby's request.

The chirping and buzzing scared the twins, and I reassured them by saying it was just the bat talking to Daddy, but bats have really high, squeaky voices.

Hubby came to the door and said he'd gotten the bat out and downstairs, and it was now doing flyovers of our living room.  He was heading downstairs to chase it out.

When Hubby came back to give the all-clear, he explained that the bat had gotten out, projectiled itself with the ceiling fan in the entry (Hubby turned that off so we didn't have a bat-ball repeat), and was thankfully uninjured and zooming around the living room.  Mika stalked the bat from the floor, keeping the bat airborne while Hubby turned off lights and opened the front doors.  When the bat's course took it back into the entryway and straight at Hubby, Hubby waved his hands so the bat could "see" him, and the bat hooked a left and flew right out of the house.

It's a good thing Hubby's brother wasn't here.  He would have been cowering on the bed with Medium.

Medium was very disappointed that Hubby didn't actually catch the bat in the butterfly net, because she wanted to see it before he took it outside.  (Apparently, my picture didn't do enough for her.)

Hubby did some final soothing and I came back downstairs.

When he came downstairs a couple minutes later, he paused in the doorway of the den.  I looked up at him questioningly.

"That weren't no baby bat," he said.  "That thing had to have an 8-10 inch wingspan.  I finally got him out, and flooloolooom." Hubby gestured with his hands.  "That was a big bat.  And I said to myself, 'There's no way that's gonna fit in this net.'"  He gave me a look.  "But you'd already told them, 'Oh, it's just a baby.'  I had to acknowledge it that way."

I suspect our leetle friend got in when I opened the front door to ask Hubby if he wanted the porch light on.  The windows in the twins' room were secure.

I just hope our vacation isn't this exciting.

I don't think I could handle that.