Bats in the Belfry

Well, one bat.

So, Wednesday morning, George is getting ready for work and is in the bathroom taking a shower while I try (unsuccessfully) to get a little more sleep before a busy day of packing and driving to Ashburn to get my brothers to help us move. Anyway, George is done with his shower and comes into our room and says, "Just so you know, there is a bat in our bathroom window. I closed it so it's trapped."

I jump out of bed and run to the bathroom where, sure enough, there is a bat trapped between the screen and the window inside our house! I think it must have crawled in through the air vent in the ceiling and tried to get out of the window.

George mentioned something about rabies, but I didn't want to just leave it there, so I ran and got a Tupperware container and lid and proceeded to try and get the bat inside. Not an easy thing when the container won't sit flush on the screen because the poor bat was smashed up right next to the frame. Or the fact that I was shaking really hard and scared it would try to fly away at any minute, or worse, bite me. With the aid of a comb to encourage the bat to get inside the container, I finally caught it. I ran and woke up Lance who I thought would be blown away seeing a bat, but because of incoherency and fatigue, the most I got out of him was a flat, "A bat? How did it get inside our house?"

I let it go outside and it didn't waste any time in escaping. I have to admit, it was kinda cute. George told a couple doctors at work about it and they mentioned rabies shots for us and the kids, just in case it bit one of us without us knowing, but after a lot of thought and 99.999% sureness that none of us were bitten, we decided against it.

Just another fun day in our house that seems to invite wildlife. Mice, slugs in our dishwasher (yeah, I don't know how they even got inside our house, let alone inside our dishwasher), huge bugs, and now a bat. I wonder if our new apartment will give us so many opportunities to commune with nature inside our home.