Alvin, Simon, or Theodore?

Yesterday the first half of my day was spend down in my office working. Yes, working on a Sunday of a holiday weekend. No, I am not a workaholic. The truth is I can be a procrastinator and then must pay a price…

Grant and the kids had been in and out upstairs working and playing in the yard. Mainly it was Henry coming in and out as he either gets bored and/or something of the outside has gotten too close to him. Now, as active as Henry is and as much as he loves to be outside, any  contact with nature, even remotely, that is not of his choosing, will send him scurrying inside. (The emergence of the 13 year cicadas this spring has been somewhat of an ordeal!)

So yesterday morning as I was working I heard Henry coming in through the garage to our bedroom. Grant called down to let me know that Henry was back inside which put him on my watch. Grant was heading to the hardware store with Lucy. Henry was staying home with me. It is rare for Henry to choose being with me over his dad so I figured he had had enough of the practically deafening hum of the cicadas or one had flown too close or something and he was not going back outside, even for a ride with his dad! 

It hadn’t been a minute and suddenly Henry was screaming upstairs! I jumped up and bounded up the stairs. My immediate thought was that he had just realized his dad and Lucy were leaving and either they hadn’t done the “good-bye ritual” or he had changed his mind and wanted to go along. Either of these two things will have him darting outside toward the car even if sometimes the car is already moving! As I hit the top of the stairs Grant was coming from the garage where he had just buckled Lucy into the van. Henry was on our bed screaming still. It took several second of getting Henry to calm down enough to decifer what he was trying to tell us.

He had heard a strange noise; a scratching across the bedroom floor. He wouldn’t get off the bed. He is screaming and crying and truly panicked! This is when Grant told me it wasn’t the cicadas that sent Henry inside but a chipmunk that had run across our driveway.

We were thinking that he had heard Grant out in the garage moving something  and since he had just seen the chipmunk he made an association and freaked.  I picked Henry up and carried him from our bed to the kitchen all the while he was just beside himself! In an effort to prove to him that all was okay and nothing was in the bedroom Grant was making a good show of checking our room…until I heard Grant with a sharp, “OH!”

Grant stuck his head in the kitchen to let us know that there was, in fact, a chipmunk in our room! I jumped up on the kitchen bench where Henry was standing! Henry started crying again.

“See! I told you I heard something!”

“Yep, dude, you were right! Daddy will get him, won’t you, daddy?”  I said in a perfectly calm voice. The look in my eyes saying, You WILL get that rodent OUT of our bedroom NOW!

Now Grant looked slightly freaked as he was trying to figure out how he was actually going to shoo this thing OUT! I stayed in the kitchen trying to calm Henry down as he was still in a panicked meltdown and Lucy was calmly waiting all buckled up in the van. Thankfully, Grant was able to get it out fairly quickly…don’t ask me how because I stayed firmly put in the kitchen with Henry!

We finally got Henry calmed down enough that it was safe for him to get down from the bench but now he didn’t want to stay home either. I don’t blame him as I was a bit creeped out as well. Ewwww!  So, off Henry went with Grant and Lucy to the hardware store after all. As much as I enjoy watching chipmunks on TV or out in our yard even, INSIDE our house is a different story and I’m pretty certain this one didn’t even have a record contract or movie deal!