Not Another Rodent Infestation

Something traumatic happened to me on Friday night and I’m not even sure that I’ve recovered enough to write about it just yet. But I’m going to try. It will be therapeutic. A chance for me to process my anguish and reflect on the damage. Please bear with me.

It was almost 8:30pm. 

Tighe and I had just made sure that everyone was tucked in their beds upstairs and retreated back to the sofa in the living room to watch some March Madness basketball. Creighton, Tighe’s alma mater, was playing Princeton, and he didn’t want to miss any of it. Which is why we put the kids to bed slightly earlier than we typically would on a weekend.

Tighe was already on the couch, fully engrossed in the game, by the time I reached him. Lately, I’ve been using my phone to play bedtime meditations for Tess and Lou for a few extra minutes. Tess loves them and they lull her to sleep pretty easily. 

Lou, on the other hand, ever the CEO of some yet-to-be-determined corporation, sees this as a chance to squeeze in a few extra minutes of work. Not ready to fully relax yet or surrender to his sleepiness, he sits upright in his bed, with a flashlight and a “seek-and-find” book. 

“Mom!” he’ll whisper to me in the dark. “I can’t find this fish.”

When I ignore him, he inevitably says, “Oh, there it is!”

And continues with his work.

So by the time I kiss them both goodnight and leave their room, Tess is pretty much seconds away from unconsciousness and Lou’s still busy.

I crept down the steps, grabbed my mug of herbal tea from its designated spot on the counter, and plopped down on the couch.

Oh, wait. First, I let Rocket inside and led him to his crate in the sunroom, which is an important detail. pulling the French doors shut behind me. He doesn’t like the noise from the living room TV to interrupt his sleep. 

I was about to open my laptop to also squeeze in some extra work. You know, like my three year-old son—when I heard heavy breathing.

More like sniffing, scratching, like the noise I imagined a wild boar would make, its nose to the ground foraging for mushrooms. Or at least I think that’s what they do. I don’t really know a lot about wild boars.

It sounded like when Rocket detects the nest of baby bunnies that live under our back porch every spring. He presses his black canine nose to the brick red wooden floorboards and sniffs up and down each crack in a back and forth motion, leaving a trail of wet snot.

“What the—?”

I thought I’d imagined it. Tighe didn’t hear it, but he was pretty zoned in on the basketball game. 

But then I heard it again.

Deeper this time. And louder. Closer.

I looked back at the French doors to make sure I had, in fact, put Rocket to bed. Was he the one making that noise?

Yep, the doors were closed. So it wasn’t Rocket. 

The sniffing, snorting noise was behind me. Definitely inside the house. Definitely getting louder.

It sounded like a raccoon. Or a possum. Have the chipmunks returned, seeking revenge after all these years?

How did it get in our house? Was it rabid?

I looked at Tighe. He heard it now, too.

I leapt up onto the sofa, breaking my cardinal rule of sofa ownership: No shoes on the sofa. Also, no food or drinks. But no one seems to follow that loosely enforced rule.

[I also have a policy about not putting one’s shoes on the dining room table, but as I type these words, there is a toddler sized pair of black and white Adidas’s just inches from my laptop.]

My heart was racing.

I was in a squatting position bouncing on the sofa, ready to either pounce on a giant, rabid rodent or run from a giant, rabid rodent. I guess it would depend on just how big it was.

I looked around for some sort of weapon like a broom or a lacrosse stick, but for once in my life as a parent, there were no such weapons within my reach.

Nope, me and this rodent were going to have to go to blows MMA-style. I assumed Tighe would have my back and although he took 6 weeks of Brazilian jiu-jitsu when we lived in Baltimore, I was not confident in his fighting ability. 

As usual, the colossal responsibility of defending the house and the family against all types of foes would fall to me.

I was ready. 

I heard the sniffing again. 

Behind the sofa? On the floor!

I looked down.

And shrieked!

And there, crouched down at the back corner of the chaise lounge was a very smiley, very hysterically laughing Lou.

“What the—?”

Tighe, who still hadn’t budged from his seat, looked to me, wondering whether he should panic or hide or call 911 or return to the game or pop some popcorn or fetch one of those aforementioned weapons that seem to be just about everywhere in our house. 

“It’s Louis!” I said flatly but sternly. “Your son.” 

As if we know multiple Louis’s.

He had crept down the steps in complete silence and snuck around the backside of the first-floor loop. Through the dining room, through the kitchen, through the breakfast nook that we don’t use as a breakfast nook, and planted himself on the floor just behind the sofa, sniffing for some reason.

I sighed with relief, but I was also mad. In an effort to sleep well at night, I try to minimize cortisol spikes during the day, and especially ones so close to bedtime. But now my heart was racing and I had nearly pooped myself.

“What are you doing down here?”

He walked in a giant circle around us, smirking and alternating his eye contact between me and Tighe. Kind of the way boxers circle each other in the ring before one starts swinging. 

“Um, I just wanted to put that ball on the bench.”

He was referring to the six-pound medicine ball that was on the floor of our living room for some reason. 

He had picked a totally random task that absolutely did not need to be completed. Ever. We don’t keep the medicine ball on the window seat. We don’t really keep it anywhere. The kids just kind of pick it up off the floor at arbitrary intervals and toss it into the air or at one another. Must be nice to have that kind of energy. I can’t pick up anything off the floor without a groan, a pulled hamstring, or a slipped disc.

“Oh no,” Tighe said to him, feigning genuine sympathy, “since you came down after bedtime, now you don’t get screen time for an entire week. That’s seven days.”

The smirk suddenly left Lou’s face and jumped to Tighe’s, who realized he had won.

“But if you go up to bed right now, I’ll pretend I didn’t see you.”

The look of alarm on Lou’s face turned to determination as he jumped to and sprinted out of the room and up the steps. He put himself back to bed and we didn’t hear from him for the rest of the night.

So, I guess it wasn’t that traumatic after all. After twenty minutes or so, my heartbeat stabilized and I slept through the night just fine. I finished my tea while it was still hot and finished a good chunk of the laptop work I had aimed to complete that night. Creighton won and moved onto the Elite Eight for the first time in school history. 

And all was well until 7am the next morning when Tighe left for his weekend retreat so that I could handle the three birthday parties, four rugby games, and one lacrosse game on our schedule all by myself. Which might be more trauma than any rabid rodent, real or imagined, could ever cause.