Bird Brain

Cassie and I have the privilege of dropping our kids off at the same sitter. Because she's wonderful, she lets us drop things off for each other there--like the flats I'm letting Cassie borrow tomorrow. We also sometimes get the treat of seeing each other in the morning. One of the things Cassie teases me about is how I leave my driver's side door open when I drop the boys off. She's threatened to take off in the car, but the joke is on her. I take the keys inside with me. Hey, I'm not an idiot.

This morning after kissing two sons and two nephews goodbye, and waving to my sweet niece, I ran out to the car and slammed the door. It was then that I heared that scratching. I froze. For those of you who read my "Wardrobe Malfunction" post, you know how I feel about rodents. I turned around slowly and saw a bird. Seriously: a bird in the back window above G's carseat. Thanks to my superior ability to keep my head in situations that involve wild critters, I responded quickly and appropriately. I ran back into the house and asked my baby sister to help me get a bird out of my car.

Little known fact: Cassie hit three flying critters inside of a year. I think two may have been birds, but one was definitely a bat. It's like they were attracted to the grill of her minivan. She has never been able to actually extract these critters from said grill. This would probably explain her "helping" by stopping on the porch--she thought "helping" involved removing a dead or dying bird from the exterior of my little car. Once she realized it was a live critter and not in the grill, she "helped" by dancing around on the porch and chanting "It IS a bird! It really IS a bird!"

Luckily for me, one son and two nephews had followed us outside. Even more luckily for me, we'd leave after the ordeal. I'm sure the sitter was not happy I'd riled the older boys all up. Anyways, the bird was flitting and fluttering all over the car, but not quite close enough to the open driver's side door to make its escape. I opened the passenger side door, and that sucker came close to touching me. I'm pretty sure. I looked back at my dancing sister. In that moment one of the boys opened the driver's side back door, and just like that: FREEDOM!

We sent the wild boys back in (thanks again, Best Sitter Ever!) and Cass and I surveyed the situation. There were no remnants of the bird including no droppings! We could hear one really ticked off bird tweeting in the trees. We're pretty sure he was telling all his birdie friends about the rough morning he'd had and the stupid humans who'd scared him half to death.