Rude Awakening

I was so looking forward to sleeping in this Saturday morning.  We had no where we had to be.  Instead, at precisely 7:19 a.m. we heard the distinct sound of something crawling around in our attic.  Not. Good.  It was loud enough to wake both Chuck & I up from a dead sleep.  You know when you hear foot steps.  You tend to take that kind of thing seriously.

So what did we do?  Well, first we jumped out of bed and stood there looking up at the ceiling.  That's the level of brain competence we're dealing with first thing in the morning.  Then Chuck asks me if it's raining.  Since I'm the one closest to the window, I peer out and assess the situation.  No rain.  Even if, I've never heard rain that sounds like footsteps in my attic, but whatever, it was early and we were just so rudely awakened by this mystery sound, we can't expect to be thinking clearly now, can we.

Now that heavy rain has been checked off the list, we start letting our imaginations run wild.  Maybe a badger is trapped in our attic.  It's too loud to be mice.  Maybe it could be a raccoon.  Or three.  It was loud!  And it kept running back and forth.  Whatever it was sounded nervous.  That was making us nervous.

I'm sure we were talking between ourselves but I can't remember a word of it.  All I know is that after about 3 minutes of standing in our room looking at the ceiling, suddenly we're both taking off for the front door....in our jammies.  I follow Chuck out to the driveway.  We now have two kids in tow.  All 4 of us are standing in our driveway, with bed head, sleep still in our eyes, and jammies all caddy-wampus from just rolling out of bed, staring at our roof.

And guess what we found:

 
Yep.  These Mallards decided that our roof made a nice perch midway on their journey to find the next nearest lake.  Apparently they (there were 3 of them) were running back and forth.  We were elated.  The alternative would have been horrible.  If something was actually in our attic that would mean there was a hole in our roof or the side of our house somewhere.  And it's pitch black up there.  I would hate to see Chuck have to pull down the attic stairs and start wrestling with some unknown creature in the dark after he just woke up.

After our little discovery session we decided to go back to bed.  Since we didn't have to actually deal with any furry creatures with teeth and rabies, we were relieved enough to resume our original positions.