OK, I'M AWAKE NOW!

I awake to the sound of soft splashing. “Who the heck is up at this time of night playing in water?!” I glance at the clock through bleary eyes. 1:34 am. Ugh. It’s probably my four year-old. The older two are too fond of sleep to play in the sink washing stuffed animals, action figures or rocks in the middle of the night….one of their favorite pastimes by day. 

I reluctantly drag myself out of bed knowing that if I don’t, I’ll wake up to some sort of pre-schooler induced flood like on our anniversary a couple of months ago.  (but that’s another story.)  I head down the hall and can already see in the soft glow of the nightlight that no one is at the sink. “Must be in the bathtub.“ Double ugh.  I get into the bathroom and glance into the tub. Hmmm. No one in there either. But there is no splashing sound now. I must have been dreaming it, or maybe it’s the dishwasher running.

At this point I need to pee. I get to the toilet and see out of the corner of my sleepy eyelids something dark in there. SOMEONE HAS POOPED AND NOT FLUSHED AGAIN!  (For some strange reason, not one of my three children ever flushes the toilet….EVER!) Being the good Girl Scout that I am, I take the environmentally friendly approach and decide to pee without flushing the offending deposit first. One flush vs. two flushes. No brainer….plus I won’t have to wait for the toilet to stop running before I can flush again.

I sit down and start to urinate. (This is all very fascinating isn’t it?)  A few seconds later…..get ready…. I FEEL SOMETHING POKING ME ON THE BUTT!! 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

As I’m flying off the toilet seat, I whirl around and spot SOMETHING JUMPING UP AND DOWN IN THE TOILET!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH……….

I am screaming like the stereotypical girl who’s seen a mouse. (I am NOT a girly girl….I can handle seeing and taking care of dead rodents, snake nests, all manners of gross bodily functions, etc.)  Yet I can’t stop screaming!!  I am so in shock!  In the meantime, I am still peeing, mind you, all over the floor….while screaming.  

I finally get a grip, realize I’m making a mess, and stop my stream and my scream. (Strangely, no one has appeared yet to see what’s going on.)  While standing in a puddle with my pants down, I decide I need to turn the light on and see what the h@ll just molested me!  A frog is my first thought. You know, water and stuff. I bravely reach over, flick the light on and look into the toilet….right into the pleading eyes of something that has soaking wet FUR?!!! 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I slam the light off again so I can’t see it and the screaming starts all over.  “WHAT THE F@#K IS THAT?!”

FINALLY, my husband comes running in as I continue to scream with my pants down.  Little did I know, and I found out later, that he had worn socks to bed. When he woke up to my ‘blood curdling screams’, he jumped out of bed and tried running, but was slipping, Three Stooges style, all over the hardwood floor. When he finally did get his feet under him to come to my rescue from the murderer he says he surely thought was doing me in, he was able to sprint the rest of the way down the hall into the bathroom.

“What the h@ll is going…..”  and he promptly slips in my pee. 

“What is that, all over the floor?!!!” 

 “It’s pee…I peed on the floor. But more importantly, there is something, WITH FUR, in the toilet….and it’s BIG!”  I screech.  (Now by big I mean bigger than say, a gerbil, of which we have two. It’s definitely bigger than them, but it IS smaller than our 40 pound dog.  He wouldn’t fit in our toilet. That’s just silly.) 

“AND IT JUMPED AT MY BUTT!”  I continue.  “WHAT IS IT?!!!”

After he rights himself, he approaches the toilet, turns on the light, and looks in.  “Oh my God…..it’s a chipmunk!”

Now how a chipmunk landed in our toilet in the middle of the night up on the third level of our house, I could not fathom. “Did it come through the pipes?”

My husband looks at me like I’m just plain simple. “No. Impossible.” 

Yeah, that’d be a pretty long climb, through water for a mammal.  I mean really, what was I thinking?  I look over again, this time a bit more over my shock, and see what looks like, literally, a drowned rat.  Poor little guy.  He’s freezing looking, soaking wet, trapped in a toilet and has just been peed on.

My husband closes the lid and disappears, presumably to get together a plan. As I’m cleaning up my mess my seven year old son, Peter appears in the doorway.   “What’s going on?” he casually asks in his sleepy eyed stupor.

“There’s a chipmunk in the toilet and it just jumped on my butt.”

He cracks a huge, braces laden grin.  “Really?  Cool!”

Then nine year old Isabella enters. Same question. Peter answers, and snorts a laugh.  She smiles too. Then goes back to bed.

Four year old Clara just starts crying in her room. She doesn’t do well with being woken up in the middle of the night, although it’s perfectly ok for her to wake us up whenever she pleases.

In the meantime I clean myself up, get new underwear, mop up the floor and wonder where Don went. Just then he appears with enormous fireproof gloves on and a bucket.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Put it in the bucket somehow….do you think it’ll bite?”

“I think the gloves will protect you. Good choice.”  These gloves are about five times bigger than the chipmunk itself…no contest!  So I watch with interest as he takes the screen off the window, replaces his gloves, readies the bucket and slowly lifts the lid.

“Awww. Poor thing.”  He really does look pathetic. What a night this guy has had! I think he maybe has a hidden camera and is doing some kind of chipmunk dare reality show. He’ll be famous in Chipmunkville for sure.

Don gets the bucket close, and after some maneuvering the chipmunk is IN the bucket.

“Got him!” he shouts.

Then the chipmunk starts to jump OUT of the bucket. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, we both scream, and in slow motion it seems, Don deftly flings the poor, wet, scared and ‘for life’ traumatized chipmunk out the window. We hear a dull thud on the porch roof (he did not fall far down…just a bit far out)  I can see the wet mark where he landed, but he is gone already.

Freedom.

As we close up the screen, the absurdity of it all breaks me. I just start laughing, and laughing, and laughing. After a while, it’s just plain maniacal. Yet I can’t stop laughing! Maybe I’m overtired, still in shock, in need of a good laugh, but whatever it is, it keeps me up for hours. And I’m still laughing today.

Yee-haw, we have a fun life here in the country!


Thought of the day:

Always look closely (and in bright light) into the toilet before sitting down!