An Unwanted Visitor

Well, I’m back. As some of you know, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl last Saturday, hence my recent absence from posting. Given that life changing event, my first return post was supposed to be about the whole hospital experience. I planned on doing my best to mix together just the right blend of emotion, humor, and hospital observations to make my first post since my daughter’s birth an entry more uplifting and meaningful than the usual petty grievances to which this blog is devoted.

That entry is still in the works, but life intervened last night with events that demanded an immediate recap. The neighborhood in which we live is afflicted, for whatever reason, with a very real propensity for power loss in the event of any kind of storm. Basically, if you hear thunder in the distance, you can count on a candlelit evening and entertainment options on par with those available to your average 19th century farmer once the sun set. That’s bad enough in general, but when you throw a six-day old newborn into the mix, it takes on an entirely different dynamic. For one thing, that newborn is in the market for food every two to three hours, and typically is covered in green runny poo and pee that is a bit more difficult to adequately address by candlelight. In addition, when you already freak out 15-20 times a day that your baby might not be breathing, realizing that she’s now swaddled in a blanket in a room that is 80 degrees and rising is more than a bit unsettling.

Being the crafty people that we are, my wife and I decided on the solution of opening up our bedroom windows. We have plantation shutters that we left closed, but no window screens. So after a few rants about the quality of Georgia Power’s efforts at restoring our power, I decided to try to catch a bit of sleep despite the less than ideal conditions. Not long after I nodded off, my wife frantically woke me to tell me about a sound she had heard outside one of the windows. I hate to say that I discounted the threat level, despite my wife’s sleep-deprived mixture of hysterical laughing and crying as she alerted me to the issue. I assured her that it was most likely a tree scraping against the house, but she persisted, and soon I heard the thumping noise for myself. Trying to keep the courage up I walked over to the window and explained I’d just open the shutters quickly, reach in, and close the window. Problem solved.

Both my wife and I read a number of books prepping us for life with a newborn. They were lengthy and full of information on things to look out for, proper routines for your newborn, and other important factoids. But not a single one of those books offered tips for how to evacuate your bedroom in an orderly fashion with your newborn in hand when a bat comes flying in through the window and right past your head. We could have used such pointers, because general chaos ensued as a black bat entered through the window. I believe my wife was on the brink of passing out on the spot. I responded by jumping over the furniture, running into the dog crate and knocking its door off on the way out of the bedroom.

Is it too late to visit the baby?

The only thing I did that displayed any semblance of intelligence was to shut the bedroom door behind me as the D’Arcy family beat a path of full-out retreat from the master bedroom. Now shut out of the bedroom with a hysterical wife, a six-day old baby, and two dogs, I attempted to plot my next move. No matter how much I tried, I could come up with no solution other than my returning to the bedroom. All phones and connection to the outside world were still in there, as were all of my clothes. I needed some information on the status of the power and how to remove a bat, and my wife needed me to be wearing more than boxers, so I was going back in.

Slowly, cautiously, I reentered the room. Not seeing the bat as I first crept back in, I gained a sense of composure. I grabbed my wife’s phone and iPad, then took the time to grab one of the still-lit candles. Mistake. I turned around to leave only to see the bat doing victory laps around the bedroom ceiling, and I made a run for it. Unfortunately, my hasty exit involved dumping candle wax all over my hand. After getting out of the bedroom and doing some hasty bat research on the iPad, I felt fairly confident that if we could just get the lights on in there the bat would probably hit the road on its own. So I reached in there one final time to turn the light switch on so that they would come on whenever Georgia Power got around to reconnecting us to the 21st century. It was approximately 3:30am when that blessed event occurred. We heard some thumping in the bedroom as the bat made its exit, and then finally we had our house back.

So if anyone out there is putting a book together on life with a newborn, I strongly recommend a passage on the value of window screens. They’re not just for bugs!