What is it with animals?

Last year, we had the infamous mouse in the house (which I just realized I never blogged about. Gasp!). This year, it's a blue-tailed skink (thank you Indianapolis Zoo for teaching me about this creature last year at ZooBoo; otherwise, things could have been really ugly!)

I came downstairs the other day to Bailey and Grandma telling me there was a mouse in the house and my first thought was "oh no, not again!!!" Grandma didn't see it, but Bailey did and she said it had a really long tail, at which point my thoughts did a complete 180 and it was "Man I hope it's a mouse!"

She saw it crawl under the loveseat, so in my usual fashion, I begin dismantling the entire room. Outdoors, these creatures don't phase me in the slightest, but in my house is another story. In my house I grow anti-creature horns and know I'm not going to sleep a wink with me AND a mouse in the same enclosed space. Rational? No. I just have this fear of the thing finding my bedroom while I'm asleep and crawling across me. Most of the vivid scenarios that play in my mind feature said creature crawling across my face or getting near my mouth. As soon as that thought enters my strange little mind, the creature has no hope. He's leaving the house one way or another.

So the room is utterly destroyed and I have the loveseat propped up to look underneath. And what do I see? Nothing.

I got out the flashlight, looked under every piece of furniture, in every nook and cranny, and still don't see a thing. So here's the thing: Bailey is great at telling stories ... sometimes a little too great, and I'm beginning to wonder whether this mouse really exists or whether it's a "fun" story.

I'm standing on the steps (because my bravery of crawling around on the floor with the flashlight has taken its toll) and out pops a little head from none other than the loveseat! I scream and it's gone again. It's a reflex. I can't help it, and yes I am ashamed that I scream at the sight of mice, spiders, and in this case, a four-legged reptile of some sort.

At that point, we called it a salamander because I saw yellow on it. I got the loveseat back up on its side and NOTHING. We've all been watching carefully and I had the screen door open so we could shoo it out, with the help of the broom. None of us saw it go anywhere and I've pretty much emptied the room of everything but the heavy furniture, which means: it's. in. the. loveseat. EEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

As gross as it sounds, I'm actually much happier that it's a salamander (so I thought) than a mouse. A mouse implies poop droppings and makes me feel dirty. A salamander makes me feel like it's in the house by complete accident.

So we aren't able to find the thing and I've come to peace with it and can go about my normal business without thinking about it TOO much. However, it's still in my head and I remembered seeing a blue-tailed skink while we were out walking the week before.

For those of you who may not know, a blue tailed skink looks like this: (and kudos to whomever named it. Creative.)

Kind of snake-like, no? They have their blue tails to distract predators. I learned this tidbit from the Zoo last year: the blue tail draws attention away from more vulnerable parts of the body. If attacked, the bright blue tail wriggles when broken off (and they can actually make this happen themselves as a defense mechanism), catching an enemy's eye as the skink escapes.

Cool, right? Except that it takes away the possibility that I'm going to grab this thing by the tail and throw it out if it ever shows up again.

And show up again it did, about 30 minutes later. Pam saw it move under a bag of flower seeds I failed to plant this year. I went and got a big bowl and put over the thing. However, the bowl wasn't heavy, I didn't hold it down, our shag carpet is long, and it escaped. Again.

This time, we were pretty sure it went INTO the door jamb. I had never noticed before, but there are little openings at each end just big enough for the little thing to get into (those won't be there much longer). So we have it confined to about 3 feet of space by the time I stuff paper towels in the ends to make sure it doesn't go anywhere while we figure out what to do next.

Poor skink. We didn't try to get it out until the next day. However, I'm sure if we asked the thing, it would've much preferred to go without food overnight than the alternative. (Glenn proposed to step on it, which sounded messy and had Bailey in fits, so we took the night to think about it.)

Bailey came up with a plan the next morning. She said we could put an empty paper towel roll up to the hole and let it crawl into the paper towel roll. She said she would hold both ends until she was outside and could let it loose. My brave little papoosky.

Her idea was far from fail-proof, but it had potential. We put the paper towel roll up against one end of the door jamb and put the other end of it into a plastic bag, so it could crawl through the tube and into the bag I was holding ... speaking of far from fail proof.

Glenn had a rod from the mini blinds that he stuck in the opposite end of the door jamb to push it out the end where we had the tube and bag.

We had our little contraption set up and Glenn put the mini blind rod in and pushed it all the way through. And we heard and felt nothing. No little scuttering feet. Nothing rustling in the bag. No resistance to the mini blind rod. Dang. All night we thought we'd had the thing trapped and it's nowhere to be seen.

So I set the bag down with the paper towel roll in it and start putting the room back in order from the little destruction we had to do to get ourselves set up. I found an old newspaper and threw it in the bag with the paper towel roll. Lo and behold there was some serious scuttering then!

Caught completely off guard, I let go of the bag and jumped so high I'm shocked there isn't a hole in the ceiling and yelled, "IT'S IN THE BAG. IT'S IN THE BAG!" as I danced around with Pam and Glenn yelling, "close the bag!" Luckily, I have superior bladder control and we only had a skink in a bag instead of a skink in a bag AND a puddle on the floor. Go me. I rock!

I'm actually pretty proud of myself. I did slightly better with the skink than I did with the mouse. (Slightly meaning there was no jumping on the furniture, it was contained to one room, and it was alive when the fiasco was over. In other words, it was a huge success.)

I closed the bag, and we carried it outside. Bailey happily watched it scurry away. So here's to you, skink. You are welcome!