Mom It Up

So there we were, just the two of us, me in the living room laughing so much I couldn't catch my breath as I watched a DVR'd "New Girl," and my daughter on the computer tumbling her way through the million trillion blogs she follows, when I gasped and wiped tears from my eyes and wheezed to her, "He ate poop!  Did you hear that?"

And she said, "Yes, Mom, I heard that, I can hear you laughing, and I also heard a really scary noise in the kitchen or laundry room."

I am so far gone with my funny bone, I'm almost broken, and can't stop laughing, but I manage to ask between laughs, "What kind of scary noise?"

"The kind a thing might make as it scraps its claw down a window screen."

Of course!  What else kind of scary noise would she hear, but a for sure monster related one?

I get up, still laughing, pause my show, laughing all the way, slip my feet into my work flats and wipe my eyes and momentarily think I need something to hold in my hands that could be used for whacking purposes, but the living room yields nothing but pillows and blankets and stacks and stacks of books, so I try to quiet my laughter and Mom up and approach the kitchen with stealth.

As much stealth as a hooked on laughing woman can.

I sober up a little as I cautiously peek around the corner.  Nothing.  I look in the dog crates and in the one cupboard our dogs have been inside of off and on for a week, all the time acting like they can scent something mouse like in it, but when I look (then and now) it's just the crockpot and some past their prime potatoes.  I look around the fridge and even scan the ceiling (bats, don't you know) and then I venture into the laundry room.  Nothing new there, either, but the bag of fake fur my daughter got for her Halloween werewolf costume is just showing enough fur from under some shoes that it could be a tail of something horrible, just enough like a tail to make my heart hiccup before I recognized it as fake fur I wish she'd return to her friend.

Whatever that scary noise was, it didn't repeat itself and there was no evidence of what could have made it, but that didn't stop me from locking the dog door much earlier than usually.

I Mom'd it up and went looking for the scary noise....but that does not mean I want to actually deal with a thing in the house that makes a scary noise!