Things Got a Little Squirrely.....

This was an email to Meg and Mary, but they got such a kick out of it, they insisted I post it. Pretty good story from a couple weekends ago:

J found a baby squirrel in our wood pile Friday night before our guests arrived. He’s pumped. (Actually, I think he was just trying to get me pumped, b/c a few minutes later he told me he broke a piece of my Vietri china.) He puts the squirrel in a box with a towel and puts the box on the dinner table. That’s right, rodent on the dinner table. Jenn and Bart cautiously asked if we were having roasted squirrel.

Anyway, after dinner, J and Bart decide they want to rig up a pen for the squirrel to play in. So they get our mesh net hamper turn it upside down and DUCK TAPE it to the box. Everyone knows a squirrel can chew through mesh, but the boys didn’t listen to me and Jenn.

The new pen is put in our bedroom. Later, the boys go in there to give him some milk and cut a “trap door” (sounds so McGuyver) and low and behold, Houdini, (what we named the squirrel afterwards) had disappeared. So they shut the door to the bedroom and we hear banging and running like a bull in a china cabinet. Just like the Chevy Chase movie. They are successful and catch the squirrel. Scared the poop out of it. Literally.

Like boys that haven’t learned their lesson, they put him BACK in the box, but reinforce it with more duck tape. Before we all go to bed, we check on Houdini, and as J is looking for him, I see the little rodent run across my closet!!! J pushes me out of the bedroom, shuts the door, and him and Bart go to work again. Successful. (I’m gonna really see how good he is in a greased pig contest one day.) Jenn and I are cracking up.

The boys are disappointed with their rigged up pen and go downstairs. We hear more banging and drilling. They come back with one of my nice blue storage tubs that now has drilled “airholes” in it and a real “trap door”. Houdini is now challenged.

Houdini is also nocturnal. In the middle of the night, I wake up to LOUD scratching, and squirrel barking, if you will. I was ticked, and very afraid that J’s rigged storage tub would not be successful and I was going to wake up to a squirrel in my pajamas later in the evening. Luckily he didn’t get out.

Not so luckily, Houdini didn’t make it through the weekend. We don’t know if he was sick already or what, but bottom line is J and I already killed our first pet.

Don’t think we’re ready for kids.