Middle of the night. Very, very quiet. The kind of quiet you can only get out in the country. Dead sleep. Suddenly, there was an extremely loud CRASH in the kitchen...
But earlier in the day…
We came home from the baseball game around 7:30 PM and sat down to eat dinner, at which point, we noticed one of the (open) windows in the dining room was missing a screen. I immediately looked around and checked all the usual things people steal when they break into a house. Nothing looked unaccounted for, so I started asking the kids if they knew what happened. I got two “no” answers and one very guilty look. The Tiny Man said he pushed it out before we left for the game. No one wanted to go get it just then because we were eating dinner, so we put it off. I was slightly alarmed that we had been gone for over an hour with an easily accessible window open, but we live way out in the middle of nowhere, and I figure there are better places to break into than our little flimsy run-down house with the two-foot-tall weeds, unless someone really wants to steal big piles of junk, so after a quick check, we determined that everything was fine.
After we put the kids to bed, it felt a little chilly in the house, so I went around closing windows and remembered the screen outside. I closed the window and told John I’d go get it the next day. We watched some season finales I had recorded earlier, one of them being about a serial murderer. I took an allergy pill with dinner, so by the time the shows were over, I was falling asleep. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was SOOOO tired... We went to bed around midnight (super late for me!) and pretty much went right to sleep. Sound asleep. Dead sleep. Medicated sleep, on my part.
The clock said 1:30 AM when we heard the crash…
My first thought was that one of the kids was up and had fallen or knocked something on top of themselves. John said later that he had just been dreaming that someone was trying to break into the house. We both jumped straight out of bed and I followed John as he went running to the living room. He said his first instinct was to try and scare off the intruder, so he yelled and smacked the wall, open-handed, before leaving the bedroom. Instinctively, I knew his intention was to scare off an intruder, so I immediately became all scared, thinking we had an intruder, and then angry at the possibility of an intruder in my house. I hovered in the bedroom doorway, heart racing while John looked around, and I seriously considered going for the shotgun. I didn’t, though, because after a minute or so, John pointed and said, “Look.” I went into the kitchen to find my crockpot in the floor. The biggest crockpot. The heaviest one I own, with the removable stoneware insert. The one that stays on top of the refrigerator. Totally confused! How on earth could something that heavy just fall from that high up... OH, WAIT. The cat came in after dinner. Did he knock it off? Was he strong enough to knock it off? He’d have had to push on it pretty hard to get it to fall off. Why would he be on top of the refrigerator? Where WAS he, anyway?
But earlier in the day…
We came home from the baseball game around 7:30 PM and sat down to eat dinner, at which point, we noticed one of the (open) windows in the dining room was missing a screen. I immediately looked around and checked all the usual things people steal when they break into a house. Nothing looked unaccounted for, so I started asking the kids if they knew what happened. I got two “no” answers and one very guilty look. The Tiny Man said he pushed it out before we left for the game. No one wanted to go get it just then because we were eating dinner, so we put it off. I was slightly alarmed that we had been gone for over an hour with an easily accessible window open, but we live way out in the middle of nowhere, and I figure there are better places to break into than our little flimsy run-down house with the two-foot-tall weeds, unless someone really wants to steal big piles of junk, so after a quick check, we determined that everything was fine.
After we put the kids to bed, it felt a little chilly in the house, so I went around closing windows and remembered the screen outside. I closed the window and told John I’d go get it the next day. We watched some season finales I had recorded earlier, one of them being about a serial murderer. I took an allergy pill with dinner, so by the time the shows were over, I was falling asleep. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was SOOOO tired... We went to bed around midnight (super late for me!) and pretty much went right to sleep. Sound asleep. Dead sleep. Medicated sleep, on my part.
The clock said 1:30 AM when we heard the crash…
My first thought was that one of the kids was up and had fallen or knocked something on top of themselves. John said later that he had just been dreaming that someone was trying to break into the house. We both jumped straight out of bed and I followed John as he went running to the living room. He said his first instinct was to try and scare off the intruder, so he yelled and smacked the wall, open-handed, before leaving the bedroom. Instinctively, I knew his intention was to scare off an intruder, so I immediately became all scared, thinking we had an intruder, and then angry at the possibility of an intruder in my house. I hovered in the bedroom doorway, heart racing while John looked around, and I seriously considered going for the shotgun. I didn’t, though, because after a minute or so, John pointed and said, “Look.” I went into the kitchen to find my crockpot in the floor. The biggest crockpot. The heaviest one I own, with the removable stoneware insert. The one that stays on top of the refrigerator. Totally confused! How on earth could something that heavy just fall from that high up... OH, WAIT. The cat came in after dinner. Did he knock it off? Was he strong enough to knock it off? He’d have had to push on it pretty hard to get it to fall off. Why would he be on top of the refrigerator? Where WAS he, anyway?
The effects of my allergy pill magically disappeared.
I turned to check on the kids when we heard another noise. Still haven’t figured out what that noise was. I think it was probably the dogs moving around on the porch when they heard us. We looked all around the house and checked on the kids, who had all slept through everything – the CRASH, Daddy yelling and hitting the wall, Mommy yelling, and the general commotion. They hadn’t budged.
I found the cat, curled up in one of the dining room chairs, looking like he’d been there all night. He seemed annoyed when I picked him up to check if he’d been hurt.
All the windows were closed. The doors were locked. We knew we’d checked everywhere earlier when we realized the window screen was gone. The only logical conclusion is that the cat was on top of the refrigerator and knocked the crockpot off into the floor.
My crockpot is broken. One whole end was crushed in around the handle, the lid was broken in the fall, and it’s not usable any more. (Also, there might be a hand-sized hole in my bedroom wall right above the light switch.) It’s good to know, though, that in a fight-or-flight situation, the fight instinct kicked in for both of us. If someone HAD been trying to break in, they wouldn’t have gotten very far! I really think we were both ready to body slam anyone who dared enter our home without our permission. On the downside, though, if one of the kids ever decides to be sneaky in the middle of the night and accidentally makes noise, their Daddy and I will probably scare them so bad they’ll pee on themselves.
1 comment:
Let me just predict the next blog....."Possum hunkering down in closet, bleeding to death from cutting itself on the broken crockpot, and Mommy makes a trip to emergency room after mild heart attack"
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