RATS!!

Well.......RATS!!! It seems to be that our squirrels bowing in the attic were really, well, rats. Sigh!

There's a story that goes with this picture....

As part of my Christmas traditions go, taking my god daughters to the Nutcracker is an annual Christmas event. This year was the first year to take Norah, the youngest of the three with us.
Now, you might be wondering, what does a toilet painted like a bunny rabbit have to do with the Nutcracker? Well, okay, the bunny painting just got my attention and quite frankly is a bit disturbing, but made me laugh when I found it, but I digress.
So, after the Nutcracker, it's tradition to take the girls out to eat somewhere. Some years, it's just for a snack and other years, dinner. This was a dinner year and I took them to Macaroni Grill for a big girls dinner. After we had been at the table for a spell, Norah needed to go to the bathroom, so away we went to take care of necessary business. Since she is 3 1/2, I accompanied her in the stall and that is where the "mom" moment occurred. As she finished pottying, I reached for the toilet paper and as she got up, an impish grin came across her face and a sparkle in her eyes lite up as she took her hand and dipped it into the public, peed in, toilet water. As I watched this happen in slow motion, I could hear my mom laughing at me from Heaven as I squealed at her to raise her hands and not touch anything as though she had just put her hands in acid itself. Norah's eyes just continued to sparkle with mischeviousness as she giggled and I reached down to pull up her stockings, making sure her hands touched nothing. In the meantime, in my mind as all of this is happening, I flashed back to a long forgotten memory of my own mother finding me in our bathroom at home waist deep and naked sitting in the toilet, as I thought it would be a great place to take an impromtu bath. I remember much of the same reaction as my own from my mother as she fished me out of the toilet, with me giggling the entire time. Flash back to present, I carefully air-lifted my giggling Norah to the sink where we entailed on a hand washing experience that likened the scrubbing a surgeon would do before an operation and chased that with me passing off to her the bottle of magic soap ( hand sanitizer) when we got back to the table. I found myself both horrified and amused simultaneously at our bathroom adventure and have now filed it away in my "special" moments logs with my sweet Norah.

Squirrels Bowling in my Attic

As the colder weather has moved in for the season, so also have a few fluffy tailed friends moved into our attic....
They seem to be diligent about bringing in dinner almost nightly and yet as we listen to them come back in from out of the cold with food, we have started to wonder if they are just really bored and are having some quality squirrel family time.
As the pattern goes, there is scampering followed by a loud "thud" of a nut and then we hear it rolling down the steep angle of the attic roof.

The first time I heard this, I had a vivid image of Scratch lunging after the lost nut.....



But as it goes in our attic, the dropping and rolling is quite frequent, so bowling it must be. So what I want to know is, does whoever wins the bowling match get all the nuts?