Bat in the bedroom

My Monday mantra (about interesting disasters) held me through till Wednesday, because apparently discovering our stable wasn't enough...

Tuesday night at 3:15 the bell on Babbington's collar woke me up - just in time to see something swoop through our bedroom. Clearly I was dreaming, so I rubbed my eyes... and saw it again. My gasp woke up André (good hubby) and I informed him - in hushed tones (because our flying visitor wouldn't have wanted me to use my normal voice) - that there was something in our room. His supportive response? "Are you sure?" Thankfully just then it flew by again and my fears were confirmed: it was a bat.

My first thought was of the baby - I was desperate to get to the bassinet and get him out despite the fact that he was sleeping quite peacefully; Andre's first thought was of the cats - he was determined to get them locked in the bathroom so they wouldn't try to catch the bat. It took a few minutes of frenetic flapping on the bat's part before we worked up our courage to run, crouching, through the bedroom and accomplish our tasks. Then, baby safely tucked next to me, cats safely away in the bathroom, we returned to our bed & pondered our options: a) Go back to sleep and assume the bat would get out the way it got in - problem: who can sleep with a bat in their bedroom, plus the cats would go crazy in the bathroom. b) Wait for the bat to fly out of the bedroom, close the door & go back to sleep - problem: then there is a bat loose in our house & the cats are still locked in the bathroom, yowling. c) Open the windows, take out the screens, lock the bat in the bedroom, let the cats out of the bathroom, go sleep in the guest room & assume the bat will find its way out - problem: other things could find their way in and we couldn't be sure the bat had left. So of course we chose option d) Open the windows, take out the screens, close the door to our bedroom WHILE WE WERE STILL IN THERE and wait for the bat to leave.

For future reference, I don't really recommend Option d. First, the screens hadn't been taken out of the windows in some time, so André had to struggle to get them down in between the bat's increasingly frantic forays around the bedroom - André even went so far as to go downstairs to get a tool to help remove them. Then, once the windows were open & the screens were out, we lay watching the desperate bat swoop around the room & never once find the windows - though it did manage to get up the stairs into the third floor, and very near the windows - and once we opened the bedroom door again, out into the hallway repeatedly and finally, the last straw, down the stairs to the first floor. At this point, with the cats scratching the bathroom door and howling while I cowered in bed with the baby (who had woken up and begun to cry only after I shrieked) and André lay on the floor near the door (so he could see where the bat was), we decided to reconsider our options.

I think I was the one who recommended catching the bat. It clearly had a favorite place to rest - an air conditioning duct in the hallway - so all we needed was something to catch it in... Since it was my bright idea, I went downstairs and returned with a strainer and a large Tupperware container. André rejected both as too small so he descended and returned with an empty plastic file box. Before you know it, André was on a step ladder holding a file box against the wall over his head & trying to coax the bat off the duct it was clinging to. After some minutes the bat was in the box & André ran it down th stairs and released it well away from the front door. Whew. It was 5:30 in the morning - more than two hours after we first saw the bat - and less than two hours until the workmen would arrive to finish the kitchen roof.

But apparently that wasn't enough excitement for the week because Wednesday afternoon I got a call from my dad. (I had sent our families a brief account of the renovations and the bat encounter.) Though his voice was measured, I knew he was upset because he was making an international phone call from his office in the middle of the day. "Sweetie," he said, "you've been exposed to rabies. You need to call the Health Department and you need to be vaccinated for rabies." I was unconvinced - there was no evidence that we'd been touched by the bat, but the Health Department was adamant: vaccines for everyone. And my reading on the web about bats & rabies suggested that they were right - and rabies is no joke - it's almost 100% fatal.

So then there was the question of Thomas. He got his first immunizations on Wednesday (before we knew that the bat thing was a problem) and I had no idea if the rabies vaccine was safe for infants. My dad had the same thought - as did the public health nurse I spoke with. So all three of us set out to find out. Dad did the best job: he posted to an Infectious Disease website and asked the experts - he got responses from rabies experts and pediatric ID docs and even a family doc who had just vaccinated a 10 week old. Everyone said that despite the tiny risk we had incurred, they felt that the vaccine was safe and that it was important for Thomas to be vaccinated, too.

So yesterday the Dept. of Health sent the rabies vaccine to our doctor's office. Unfortunately, no one there had ever administered a rabies vaccine - so not only did we have to call them and say, "Um, hi, you're about to get a bunch of rabies vaccine and you have to find a way to fit three people in your schedule for this afternoon and some way to help us get the next round on Sunday" (not what most doctors' offices most want to hear), but then they had to figure out how they were supposed to administer the stuff! They were, of course, super nice about the whole thing, but there was some confusion and we ended up spending over 2 hours there & keeping both the doctor and the nurse well past their 4:30 closing time (we were there till after 6). In the end, André and I got 5 shots (4 in our butts - yikes!) and Thomas got 2. Our doctor graciously insisted that she was fascinated & was really learning something - and they didn't even complain when I corrected them several times (since I had spent a lot of time reading about the vaccine & talking to my dad there were two times when I tried to politely suggest that they might have overlooked something). And then they have an intern who has to come in on Sunday and give us the next round (only one shot from now on) - and the poor thing was literally learning how to give the shot from the nurse - André was her practice patient (the nurse demonstrated on me). Sunday should be interesting!

Oh, and to add insult to injury, you have to know your weight - not something I wanted to know 8 weeks after giving birth.

Anyway, it's been quite a week - and frankly I'm hoping that today will be downright boring.

Kitchen? Stable?

So, you may know that our house is 100 years old this year. You may even know the cool little detail that our kitchen was where the stable used to be. And some of you know that a few months ago we had a small leak in the kitchen ceiling & since then I've been on a fruitless search to find roofers (the job was "too small" for most of them).

Friday I finally finally found someone who agreed to such a small job (probably just a patch on the roof - maybe re-do the kitchen roof). The handymen-cum-roofers showed up Monday morning (and started throwing things in the dumpster at 6:50 am, I might add) and within 30 minutes the big boss was ringing our doorbell. Here's a change of perspective: it's not that our kitchen is where the stable used to be - it IS the stable. A hastily dressed André followed the boss outside and up the ladder to see with his own eyes that a) there were SIX layers of shingles on the roof - each one placed right over the previous and b) once those were removed the supporting beams and various bits of wood were from the original stable (aka approx 100 years old) and c) most of those were rotten. André was especially impressed with the guy's ability to pull away parts of the beams with his hands. Ahem. (In the picture, the top board is the old rotten one and you can see what was passing for insulation!)

So we all agreed that it would cost more than we originally planned & they went to work & André went to work - and then the doorbell rang again... and a few minutes later I looked out the guest bedroom window (which overlooks the kitchen) to see the floor of the old stable hayloft & to notice that brick was crumbling where whoever dreamed up this mess just slapped things together & and to confirm how even more of the beams were rotted than they'd guessed & how there was almost no insulation up there. "Wasn't the kitchen cold this winter?" they asked. "Yes," I said. Sigh.


The final straw from Monday was when our kitchen ceiling started to crack. I went up & told the guys & they said "but we're not standing on the ceiling." True enough, but the ceiling was still cracking. Next thing I know, they're putting up a little paper sign that says "Do not enter the kitchen" & running to Home Depot to construct a make-shift brace to hold up the ceiling while they finish the roof. The big boss - who's name is also André - poked another small hole in the ceiling and told me that it's not a full-fledged ceiling - they just stuck some plaster or drywall or something on the lats (boards??) from the original stable. Nice. I decided to go sit in a local café so my ceiling didn't fall on my head while I collected myself.

André has already told us that when they cut into the walls (something we agreed needs to be done because we can see the water damage - but which we decided we would look at after the roof was dealt with) he's pretty sure that we're going to find that the walls are the actual stable walls - with siding on one side & drywall on the other. "But," he says, "maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised." Maybe.

At first I was pretty worked up about all of this, but then I decided that if we have to have a disaster at least it's an interesting disaster!