Here's a story to share. It is kind of slow at the beginning, but like many good books, read to the end for the "punch line" of the story, and you won't regret it! So about a week ago, I woke up and started the day out as usual. But something was different. There were weird noises coming from our fireplace. It sounded almost as if someone was dropping something down. I looked up, and couldn't see anything. This went on for a few hours and I just tried to ignore it. Emma and I had a doctor's appointment and errands to run, so we left and forgot about it. When we got back home, immediately I noticed our white sliding blinds were going crazy in every which direction like strong wind was blowing in our house. Oh great, our house is haunted now, I thought to myself. Holding Emma tightly, I went up to get a closer look and saw a black thing on the ground between the blinds and sliding glass door. Eek! It just had to be a rat, so I started screaming a bit and jumped on the couch to get out of its way. But then it started flying...it wasn't a rat after all (phew) it was a black bird! It flew right over us, and so we ran in our bedroom and closed the door. I put Emma on the bed and went to close all of the bedroom doors. I would go back out, but then it would start flapping its wings again and swoop somewhere new, perching on different things in our house. I tried to open the back door that it was by most of the time, but the blind panels all have to be facing the same way for it to open and they were all messed up from the bird flying in them. So I would run over, fix a few of the blinds, then it would fly back over by me, and I'd run back into the room. All of this time, my heart was racing, and I was trying to stay calm, but it wasn't working so well. I was on the phone with Dave and he thought it was quite amusing. At least somebody did. I opened the front door and tried to coax it out that way. "Out this way, birdie" I would say, to have Emma say "come on birdie" right after me. But it just seemed to laugh at us, as it would fly around again. It perched itself on many things. Emma and I came out of hiding to check on it again, to see if by chance it had flown out yet. It flew across the room, and landed on the head of a statue we have of Christ. Right then (the best part of the story), Emma said "That's Jesus, birdie!" It was the comic relief I needed to take care of the problem once and for all. To make a long story short, and I've probably already made it longer than it needed to be, we finally got the bird out the back door, after untangling all of the blinds. Luckily, we didn't have any bird poop, but we did have some gray marks leftover where the bird ran right into a few times. It was a poor, confused birdie, and I don't know if he was more scared of us, or if we were more scared of it! For the last week, Emma has been looking up any fireplaces she sees and calling "birdie!" So fast forward to a few days later, we were over at Grandma's playing in the backyard. I wasn't there at the time, but Emma and Grandma were having a great time swinging, going down the slide, playing in the grass. My mom looked away to check a bush she had just planted, when she heard Emma screaming like she's never heard before! She thought the worst had happened, Emma fell or was bitten or stung. So she ran to her, and right then a bird flew away. I guess it got too close for comfort for Emma, and she wigged out. Poor Emma, I think she'll be afraid of birds for the rest of her life now.
