In her Easter basket, Anna received one of those fluffy little electronic chicks that "cheeps" when you place it in the palm of your hand. She carried it around with her everywhere she went and named it Tweety.
"Ahhh, my Tweety." She'd speak to it and cuddle it like it was a baby of her own.
This morning I found her in the bathroom attempting to give Tweety a bath in the sink. Actually, I was in an adjacent room when I heard Tweety's "tweets" going on endlessly "tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet" . . . . then the tweets started to sound a little bit deeper, and longer, and deeper still. By the time I got there Tweety was sitting in a puddle of water on the bathroom counter. We dried her off and her tweets returned to the normal, high-pitched tweets we had grown used to the last few days.
But, they didn't stop.
It kept going and going, completely on it's own. There was no palm-holding required to make this Tweety go. I turned Tweety over -- no "off" switch. Darn it.
I got after Anna for messing around in the bathroom sink and went back to the busy task of getting everyone ready for school.
We made Tweety stay at home while we took the kids to school. And to have the tires rotated and grocery shopping. When we returned 2 1/2 hours later, Tweety was still tweeting. I thought, I can handle this. Surely the batteries will die. Eventually. Anna was really attached to the thing so I didn't want to do anything drastic like, say, take it out back and smash it with a hammer.
Just before lunch it began grinding on my nerves. You could hear it just about everywhere in the house. Payton came home, I started to get lunch ready, and I told Anna to take Tweety upstairs to her room. A few seconds later I walked into the living room and Anna is just standing there by the window. Looking . . . suspicious.
Me: Did you take Tweety upstairs?
Anna: Mmm-hmm.
But I can hear muffled tweeting coming from her direction. I figure she's stuffed it in or under the leather chair.
Me: Anna, where is Tweety?
Anna: I don't know.
Grrr. I know she knows exactly where it is. For pete's sake, we can both hear it! I step closer and realize that Tweety is not stuffed in the leather chair. I know exactly where it is and I'm not happy about it.
The questioning continues unsuccessfully. Anna has decided that she's going to test some new waters today -- lying. Nice. Even though I know where it is I'm not going to back down until she tells me. There were many tears shed and finally a finger pointed in the direction of her dear, sweet Tweety.
The heater vent.
I pulled up the cover and Tweety cannot be seen. But she is definitely heard. Ohhh, great.
Now we have an annoying little bird stuck in our heater ducts, tweeting away, and who knows when or if the batteries will ever die. I almost started laughing, but I was still so mad at her for blatantly lying that I was able to keep my mean-mom face. She's in her room now and will be there for a long time. We'll see how long Scott's arms are when we gets home. In the meantime, I'm shaking my head and wishing death to Tweety.
the silver lining: being forced to remove the heater vent and inspect the ducts allowed me to discover that our heating duct is hanging precariously by a single screw (the other 3 have popped out). The gap is letting a ton of cold air blow into the house from the crawlspace. Got it on the fix-it list now. I'm reeeeally hoping that the heavy weight of other discarded objects is not the reason for this.
