Bats In the Belfry

There are bats in my basement.

I went downstairs last night with a heaping armload of bedding to wash when I was startled by the terrifying swoop of shadows across the top of the basement stairs. Perhaps there was just one little bitty bat flying around my basement, but the swooping shadows across the stairwell and walls told my inner spook-o-meter that there were at least two or three and that they each had a wing span of about six feet and were likely rabid and very hungry.

I squealed (girlishly) and heaved the unwashed laundry into their flight pattern, further disrupting and I realized likely enraging them. Then I turned off the basement light and ran into the kitchen, slamming the door.

I know I was totally over-reacting. I knew it at the time.

First of all, I am not a girl who has never seen a bat before. I grew up in a series of decrepit old farmhouses. My father has a motto when searching for housing for his family: if the dwelling is not about to collapse, falling down or abandoned, it probably won't sustain the joys that come with undertaking extensive remodeling while small children eat rusty nails and plaster for months on end. The only house we lived in as kids that didn't need extensive remodeling to make it habitable was a trailer home we lived in for about a year in the late 70s. And I will admit that it was at least twice as hideous as any delapidated house we ever lived in.

The point is: I have seen many many a bat inside the house in my day. And yet, that doesn't make me any happier about it.

Secondly, truth be told, I have seen these very bats in my current house before. In the almost two years I have lived here, I have seen them (it's likely actually two or three total) in my basement on at least three or four other (equally creepy) occasions. And twice now, they have made they way all the way into the upstairs.

The first time one dared to show its furry little face in the upstairs, I quickly got Hubby to somehow get rid of it. I could not tell you what he did because I hid in the bedroom until it was done.

Last weekend, I was in our home office talking to Hubby (who was visiting, remember) when I glanced into the hallway and noticed a small upsidedown star-shaped lump hanging from my hallway ceiling. I suddenly remembered how Banana Girl had told me that she had seen a bat in the basement earlier in the week. (She had told me how she just had to finish changing her laundry, so she just stood there, loading and unloading clothes and diapers while reminding herself that bats have radar and would not bump into her. She is crazier and braver than Christian Bale in Batman Begins people!)

I'll admit, when I saw that bat in my hall, I think a little pee trickled down my leg. I really wasn't happy. I hissed: "Honey, I think I see a bat" and then promptly scurried into the bathroom and peered into the hallway through a slit in the door. Hubby wasn't perturbed in the least (my hero) and got a plastic bin that is supposed to hold kid's toys but wasn't (because said toys were spread across three rooms of the house as usual) and calmly slid the bin underneath the sleeping bat (yeah right, it was sleeping. I think it was pretending to sleep in order to lull someone close enough to it in order to swoop down and chew through the nearest jugular) dislodging it and trapping it with the sealable cover to the bin.

And then it was show and tell time.

While I wiped the trickle of urine off my leg, Hubby called the kids from their oblivious play to "see the neat bat that Papa caught." As a parent, I feel it is one of my duties to try to not pass on my admittedly unreasonable fear of things which society has already taught me to fear, like spiders and bugs and reptiles and bats and the like. So, I gamely joined in: "Gabe, look at this cool little bat. He got stuck in our house, but we are going to help him go back outside." All the while my skin is crawling and I am keeping three feet back of the bat box. Both Gabe and Quin thought the bat was the coolest thing ever, especially after he woke up and started scuttling all over the transparent plastic box in a vain effort to find a new cool dark place to wait for an unsuspecting jugular upon which to gnaw.

In retrospect, dear internet reader, I wish I had taken a few photos to share with you so you could appreciate the situation, but in all honesty, I was far too engaged in showing the kids the bat quickly and then getting it the hell out of my house before I pissed myself for real.

We finally brought the increasingly disturbed (and hungry for sweet jugular goodness) bat out to the front lawn and opened the box and watched it fly across the street and into a tree. The kids wanted to know where it was going and we said it would find a new and better home, but I know it has likely come back into my basement where it is used to nesting and is waiting until a day when Hubby is not here to exact its revenge upon me for daring to upset his lair. He will likely have Mrs. Bat with him and they can plan their attack and go for both jugulars simultaneously and drop me like a bag of bricks.

So, next time there is no new post for a few days, please send someone to my house to see if I am bleeding and unconscious on my basement floor. But watch out, I may be rabid. And hungry for sweet jugular goodness.