Spring Flipped Us the Bird

Tyler and I switched for church today. I went for Sacrament Meeting so I could sing with the choir and he went for the end part since I had to be back to appease the hungry baby.

On my shift, I was walking around burping Pearl (who refuses to burp in most cases). I was working on lunch and dinner with one hand and marveling at how windy it sounded outside. In fact, something near the side of the house sure was flapping around and making a racket.

On closer inspection, it seemed that all the noise was coming from behind the pantry, but the only thing back there was the garage. I was hesitant to go check in the garage fearing some feral animal had been trapped in there and I was holding my baby, but as I walked through the laundry room, I realized I had no need to fear because the animal was clearly behind the wall. I could hear it scraping, scratching, and thrashing about.

It took little deduction to figure it was probably in the dryer vent and after going outside and seeing the vent stuck in the open position on the outside, that confirmed my stellar detective skills.

I waited until Tyler came home and told him my hunch. He seemed skeptical, but after unfastening the dryer hose and hearing the commotion inside, he was a believer.

Then we had to get the thing out of course. Tyler guessed it was a bird, simply because he could hear wings flapping. I wasn't going to decide until I saw the critter. Trust me, I wanted it to be a bird...I can't stand mice in my house. I was quite proud of Tyler. He went outside and threaded our long tape measure through the maze of dryer vent. I manned the vent inside and waited for our hapless victim to show it's beak. The tape measure came out first, but after several attempts, we had success.

Seriously, we caught a bird. Pretty impressive, eh? Then again, it's not my first bird.



I caught it, but we will give credit to the man for flushing it out. Then we released our prisoner.



There seemed to be no permanent damage as he flew off into the sunset. (Okay, you have to imagine a sunset.)



And then Ivory said (with no prompting) "And NEVER come back!"