Saturday, January 2, 2021

Bang! Patter Patter...

My daughter has come into our room for many different reasons during the night.   Sometimes she's had a bad dream or she's woken up early or her brother is bothering her (because she woke him up) but last night she came in for a reason that was new in a different way. 

She said she's heard a loud bang in the attic, followed by a walking or pattering sound.  She was scared and there was no way she was going back to bed without someone checking it out.   I suppose I drew the short stick because my husband was more asleep than I was, so I got out of bed with her following me, asking if she could spend the rest of the night in her brother's room. 

My daughter is susceptible to suggestion, especially when it comes to being afraid about something.   My husband thought he'd heard a sound like animals had gotten into the attic the day before and even though he found no evidence of such, it stuck in my daughter's head. 

She had gone up to the attic herself and said out loud, "I'm a little blind girl, is anyone there?"  That, in and of itself was interesting to hear her say that.   She didn't get an answer and I was hoping to discover something had fallen down.  I had no such luck though. 

There was zero sign of an infestation, particularly one of the size that would be making bang noises.   I found something I thought might have fallen after the holiday decorations were put up, but later my husband told me he'd knocked it over and hadn't gone behind the shelf to pick it up. 

After reassuring my daughter there was nothing to fear in the attic and that I thought she'd be fine, she asked again if she could finish the night in her brother's room.  Yes, she could sleep in the bunk bed, but she needed to go in quietly.   

I watched her climb up to the empty, top bunk and then went back to bed, only to sit bolt upright when I heard something that sounded like a large door slamming down from the direction of the attic and my daughter's room.   At this point, I got my husband up.   He found nothing and we spent the next ten minutes look and listening through video feeds from the cameras outside the house, thinking with all the rain perhaps it was a branch. 

An external search of the house turned nothing up but one camera, located at the front door, did hear some sort of muffled sound.   We're not sure what it was because we gave up at that point.   My daughter made the mistake of waking up her brother when she heard the second noise. That did not go over well.  At all. 

Today, my husband took the drone and flew it over the house, and found no downed branches.  Eventually and finally, we decided it must have been a big gust of wind, even though it wasn't particularly windy, and the garage door panels banged back and forth once.   Hopefully, tonight will be a quiet night.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is going to have withdrawals from screens when distanced learning starts on Tuesday.   His computer will be fixed tonight and he can do some gaming on it before he has to go back to school.   It's been broken since December 24th.   As I type this. his father has the computer completely apart on the table to add the replacement parts for the ones that burned up with the power supply debacle which took his computer out last month.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was up a lot last night so I wasn't surprised to find her asleep this morning at eleven when I went to check on her.   She had fallen asleep while listening to an audiobook.   When I touched her shoulder she lifted her head, clearly just coming out of a dream, and said, "are we really moving to a new house?   I assured her we weren't.  

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