An Uninvited Holiday Guest...

Y'all wouldn't even believe it if I hadn't taken pictures, so rest assured I have photographic evidence of the tale I am about to tell! (Those that follow me on Twitter already know what happened, but this is the full story!)

Friday night I woke up around 1:30 in the morning needing to go to the restroom. I don't even think I completely woke up, but I stumbled into the restroom to do my thing. I must insert here that we have a little potty room within our bathroom, so you go into a TINY little nook with just a toilet and it has it's own door. Usually when I have to get up in the night to use the restroom I go into the tiny room and close the door before I turn on the light so it won't wake Dave up. So, back to the story....so I go into the tiny room, close the door, flip on the light, sit down on the toilet and I see something about 1 FOOT away from me staring straight at me with it's beady little eyes...it honestly took me about 2 seconds to realize that it was in fact real and not a dream and that I was one-on-one with a SQUIRREL in my bathroom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I screamed bloody murder and FLEW out of that bathroom and started yelling for Dave that there was a squirrel in the bathroom!! Now let me interject another quick fact....I talk in my sleep. A lot. I tend to have CRAZY dreams that make me do crazy things. I have another story for another blog, but let's just say that a few weeks ago Dave and I both woke up very bruised after I dreamed we were almost hit by a semi. In my defense, we were bruised because I was saving our lives. thankyouverymuch. But anyhow, he literally didn't budge, he just casually opened his eyes and I was sitting on top of the bathroom counter. I promised him with every fiber of my being that there really was a squirrel in our bathroom and that he needed to save the day!

At that point, I really woke up. And I started hearing what I was saying and I started wondering if there really was a squirrel in the bathroom because let's be honest....what are the odds?? I tiptoed back over to the bathroom, looked behind the door and there she was....and she wasn't small people! At this point I looked for Rookie to make sure he didn't get in on the action, and he was just laying on the bed...hadn't moved a muscle. He was shooting us the death stare for waking him from his slumber. Some guard dog!

We put him outside and went into problem solving mode. There was a freaking squirrel in our bathroom! So we got Rookie's crate and were trying to figure out how on earth we were going to coerce a squirrel into a dog crate. I started Googleing how to catch a squirrel and all of the answers weren't comforting when it was telling us to put peanut butter in our trap and give it 4-5 days. But each commentary told us that squirrels could be aggressive, very quick, and many carry rabies. Noted.

In the end, we settled on Animal Control which opened at 8am on Saturday morning. By this time it was 2:30. We decided to secure the borders and go sleep in the guest bedroom. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep knowing we had a huge squirrel probably chewing through our walls downstairs.
At 8am we called Animal Control and left a message that we had a guest in our home. Their first question to Dave was, "Did you bring it in?" WHAT?? Did we bring the squirrel in our home?? For what? A playmate for Rookie?? NO, we didn't bring a freaking squirrel in our house! After the silly questions we got to the nuts and bolts of the matter. We needed a squirrel removal ASAP. An hour later we had Deputy Dewey at the front door with his net. I tried to take a picture of the removal but he closed the doors "for our safety". About 30 seconds later he appeared with our little friend wrangling around in his net and he proceeded to walk out in our backyard and let her loose.

We figured out that she came in through the vent above our stove. When I had gotten home from work on Friday the cabinet was open and I had wondered why Dave had left it open. I'm not tall enough to see inside of it, so I just shut it and went on. On Saturday I asked him what he needed out of that cabinet and he said, "I wasn't in that cabinet." At that point I had an "A-Ha!" moment and we figured that must have been how our friend got in. When we opened the door and got a stool this is what we found....

Long story short, we called pest control and they said that she didn't chew through our roof and there was no damage. They simply think she was on the roof and somehow managed to fall into the vent for our stove. They said she went into survival mode and was going towards light...the light just happened to be our HOME!! She chewed through that portion of our vent, but Dave fixed it yesterday afternoon and we should be good to go.

It was pretty crazy and I honestly don't know when I'll get the image of flipping on the light and having a SQUIRREL staring me straight in the eyes out of my head. I had to take some pictures so you guys would believe me! I hope you enjoy your holiday guests and I hope they are all there by invitation!!

Me: "Some guard dog you are! There was a squirrel 20 feet away and you were sleeping like a baby!"
Dave: "Yeah Bear! Are you just eye candy?"

PS...that picture of the squirrel was taken at about 7:30am on Saturday before Animal Control came. When I first saw her, she was in another corner of the bathroom facing me with her tail up behind her. Literally about 1 foot away from me. I can only imagine that that is what it must feel like when you hallucinate something. Because since I was half asleep, it took me a minute to realize that it really was real. It looked so real, but I was thinking, "Is that a squirrel?" But yep, it was real!