Nightmare?

Aw. Isn't this just the cutest little fellow? A flying squirrel. Yes, there are such things! As a matter of fact I just found out first hand that these little fellows really do soar!

Let me back up a few incredible steps first. You really should know the full breadth of the story. So yesterday, as I sat by my friend's pool chatting with friends, one of the lady's mentioned having a drowned flying squirrel in her toilet last year. "A flying squirrel you say?" I asked, as my 4 year old did a flip off the diving board for the fifth time. "Yes Jennie! They are really very cute!"

Cut to 3:00 this morning.
~You know how sometimes you dream about the very thing you heard about the day before??~

Stan awoke and mumbled something unheard by me about feeling a "something" jump off the bed and hearing it fall to the hardwood floor. He evidently got out of bed, turned on the light and searched the floor and found nothing. Return to sleep. Then around 3:45am I have the startling experience of feeling and hearing something run across my pillow and then scampering across the floor. I sat up in bed, woke Stan, turned on the light, looked around. Nothing. I watched TV, checked on Sean who was sleeping next to his bed tangled up in his covers. I fixed that, went back to sleep assuming that I had dreamt the whole thing. Just as I fell back asleep, I felt something drop onto the blanket on my leg. I kicked into the air, flipped on my light and awoke Stan. "I KNOW I FELT SOMETHING FALL ON MY LEG! " We sat there bleary-eyed and confused, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. Then suddenly I caught my curtains moving from the corner of my eye. We both ran to the corner of the bed nearest the door and stood and watched as a rather heavy form quickly scaled the inside of the curtain and reached the top. Out popped that face you see there, well, his cousin. Big black eyes, big ears, bigger than a mouse, for sure...and a long flat furry tail.

My friend's voice ran through my head, "It really does have a cute face," she had said. I blurted, "It's a flying squirrel!" Stan said, "WWwhattt?" And we watched as it hunched down, took aim and FLEEEEWWWWWWWW across our room into our closet.

By the way, this is not a nightmare in the dreamy sense, but a nightmare in the real sense.

We jumped out of the room, I screamed, Stan slammed the door shut, shoved a towel under it and said to his flailing wife with a grin, "Just pretend we're camping!" I replied convulsively with a childish whine, "That's just it honey! We're NOT camping! We're HOME - in our BEDROOM!" We went downstairs for the plan. He procured a net and a racket ball racket. I got the flashlight and a shoebox. Before he proceeded up the stairs with the tools of necessity I begged, "Do you need me up there? Because I'd really really like to stay down here and freak out." He assured me he'd be just fine alone and turned in his boxer briefs holding a racket, a child's bug net, a shoebox and a flashlight. I jumped around downstairs and tried to lose the feeling of being ran upon in my sleep by a rodent.

Very soon he came back down with both implement handles sticking out of the box. The flying squirrel was stuck between nets in the box and we needed another plan. Do we just set it free? We decided to keep it till morning when we could think straight. A few weeks ago we set free a bat from our living room before we realized we should have had it checked for rabies so we didn't want to make the same mistake. This morning, the creature was sleeping nicely in the metal trash can we dropped it in. The animal control told us we could set it free if it didn't bite anyone and that we should have kept the bat and had it tested.

Um, a couple days ago we had baby skunks in our yard. I am starting to freak out. Once I stop freaking out, I will post some pictures of the skunk, maybe the squirrel if I can get one before it pops out of the can, and Stan in his underwear holding a racket and a net. No, I won't post that last one, but I have to admit we did take two. It was 3:45, we were laughing our butts off and it seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

(See pictures below.)