Scary Woodland Creatures

D2, Bebe, and I go for a walk every night before bed. It’s gotten to the point that when Bebe is tired at night she will point to the mei tei and gets really excited as I put it on. At first, we would just wander through the streets, up to a big park nearby, and then back, but lately we’ve been walking in the forest behind our house and bringing a lantern with us. It works out well because there’s a short loop we can do, but if we get to the exit for the short loop and she’s not asleep there’s a longer loop we can do too.

So the other night we decided to do the longer loop. We were almost to the end of the forest part, the last bit is along a road. There’s a very dark part at the end where you basically can’t see anything, and our little lantern doesn’t help much. We had just started through that area when all of a sudden the bush right next to the path started moving and we could hear what sounded like an enormous animal moving around.

I’m going to back up a little bit before I get to the punch line. I have always fancied myself as pretty independent. I don’t need a guy to go and get the car when it’s raining, I have no need for my chair to be pulled out, I’ll change my own oil and fix my own computer, thank you very much. In school, I’d rather play sports than dance. (I actually think I used to be independent to a fault, but that’s a post/rant for another time.) I also don’t think about things like clothes or shoes much. (This is obvious in the fact that I wore the $110 pants my mom gave me to a co-op maintenance party (and not the celebration kind, we were doing gardening and painting)… oops.) I actually like most bugs and spiders and I don’t mind getting dirty.

So what do you think I did when we heard the rustling in the bushes? Did I grab a nearby tree branch and jump in front of D2 ready to save the day? Did I yell and wave my arms and try to scare it off? Or did I backpeddle ten feet leaving poor D2 alone with our 15 pound dog to save the day by himself?

Yep, that’s right, I skedaddled out of there. My excuse is that I was the one with Bebe and I needed to protect her. Turns out, whatever was in there (my guess is a giant cougar or a bear, D2′s guess of raccoon just isn’t nearly as impressive) was as scared of us as we were of it and it turned and ran too. D2 admitted he was pretty freaked out too though, so it wasn’t just me. We both decided we didn’t actually want to go through the dark part and we just turned and went back the way we had come. We actually haven’t walked that way since. Last night when we got to the short part of the loop and Bebe wasn’t quite asleep, we just turned around and did the loop again backwards instead.

Related posts:

1. Luminara
2. Spring
3. Sleeping Baby
4. Potty Talk
5. Coming Back