Charlie and I are laying in bed, watching a movie tonight when all of a sudden, something FLIES in to our room and starts orbiting our bed. For a split second, I thought it was a toy helicopter but then my brain quickly makes the connection that:
1. The children are all asleep and thus the operator of such a toy is currently unconscious
2. We don't have a toy helicopter
We realize at the same exact moment that the thing orbiting our heads was a bat and we began screaming. The screaming, you've never heard such screaming in your life. As I laid in bed and threw a pillow over my head, Charlie jumped up and was running around the room screaming (like a man), "IT'S A BAT! OH MY GOD! IT'S A BAT!!! VIRGINIA HAS BATS!!!"
He opened the window, hoping the bat would fly out, but of course the bat didn't fly out and instead, seemed to go faster and faster around and around. With each orbit, the bat was flying lower and lower and I was waiting for the little thing to bump in to me because .... aren't they blind? Just as Charlie grabs a bed sheet and tries to throw it on top of the bat, I jump out of bed and crawl in to the bathroom with a pillow over my head. Screaming.
Charlie's aim - it would turn out - was horrible (less than precise). He'd scream (in a manly way) and then toss the sheet but by that time, the bat was 1/2 of the way around it's orbit. Round and round that thing flew and Charlie kept tossing and screaming (like a passionate sports player) and tossing and screaming and I opened the bathroom door to take a peek and SCREAMED when it almost flew in.
I suggested that Charlie swat it out of the air with a tennis racquet, but he didn't want to kill it. So I suggested he use our children's butterfly net. He ran downstairs to get the net and came back in to the room and screamed (a battle cry) some more once he saw it again. On his second try, he snatched it (right) out of the air (like only a person with extreme precision and accuracy could do) with the net.
(Charlie thinks that those pointy things visible in the picture below are it's wingtips. Or more appropriately it's FANGS.)
We then took it outside and I very daringly held me camera over the open net and snapped off a picture of what appears to be a tiny little thing, but trust me: IT WASN'T TINY. When those wings were fully extended it looked like a pterodactyl.
Charlie laid the net flat and as I stood behind him, using his body as a shield, the bat flew out of the net and away from us, but that didn't stop Charlie from screaming (his war cry) again and jumping back, to the point that he knocked me completely off my feet (because he is so chivalrous as to save his wife from a flying rodent).
So what if my tailbone is most likely broken. The dude is my hero.
If I'd been the only adult in the house, I have no doubt I would have called 911.
