Adventures of Pet Sitting

My youngest son, Ben, and I are house and pet sitting for my mom while they are out of town. 

We come in late last night and get the animals fed and take them outside to potty. When they came back in, mom's little chihuahua mix dog, Dylan, has brought in a friend. In her mouth is a live locust. The locust is screaming as loud as it can for its life. If you have never heard a locust scream, they are painfully loud, almost like the horrible static from a radio station. So Ben is freaking out because he is terrified of these bugs. Patches, mom's cat calmly looks at Dylan, walks up to her and just whops her right on the head. In turn, Dylan spats out the locust and now it is flying like crazy all in the kitchen. Charlie, mom's older, more 'over it' dog makes eye contact with me, and at that moment I swear I saw her roll her eyes. 

So, pause. In this chaotic moment, I try to freeze my memory to capture this moment in my mind forever. My son is terrified and screaming, yet he has the biggest smile on his face. He is frozen in the air from jumping out of the way of a poor locust that was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is holding onto the back of a chair that is about to topple over from his reaction.  Patches is sitting up looking down on Dylan with her paw still outstretched from whacking her across the head. She has a determined look and is certain that locust will be hers.  Dylan's look of confusion with her paws outstretched frantically trying to recapture her prize but she is facing Patches with such a funny, raw expression of "what the heck just happened', and she is just not able to quite grab the locust back.  Charlie, sitting in the middle of it with her eyebrows arched up high and looking for me to figure out what to do, perhaps it was a silent plea for help. And me, I don't know what my expression was. Maybe it was panic, there are a lot of breakable things at moms house. Maybe annoyance, because chaos seems to follow me. Maybe though, just maybe, and I really do hope, that I had a smile. Because looking back at this moment forever in my memory, however chaotic it was, will always remind me that we lived last night. We giggled last night. We had fun and even though we didn't know it at that moment, we made a memory last night.  

Side note: We also do not know who ended up with the locust or where he flew off to hide, as we never heard his shrill scream again. We can only hope he found his way back outside.