Things that go bump in the middle of the night

Last night at 1am Matt woke me up from a dead sleep saying "Leslie get up! Come see this bear."
He is standing at the window in our room peeking out through the blinds in only his boxers. I can only see him thanks to the glow of Conan O'brian.
I roll out of bed and watch as a seven to eight foot-tall bear saunters up our driveway. It is ENORMOUS. It walks into the darkness out of reach of our motion detecting light and stands up to knock over our garbage can with the slight flick of its paw. Yeah, it was frightening.

Matt yelled at it in his deepest voice; which was full of MENACE and TESTOSTERONE "Get outta here BEAR."

The bear, frightened by the manliness exhibited by my husbands voice, calmly snaked a bag of trash and walked into the woods to devour a bag full of poopy diapers and banana peels.

Matt then went into the basement, found his pellet gun and went onto the back porch and proceeded to shoot pellets at the bear.
The bear left a short time after that, but Matt was so pumped on the adrenaline of the experience that he was awake until 3am.

Fantastic.

Thar's a Bar

Yesterday, the cover story of our local paper The Citizen Times was about how a bear ate a local couple's pet schnauzer (as opposed to the wild schnauzer population that is roaming the hills) when the husband let the dog out to pee on Sunday night. The story included lots of information about how to make sure that bears aren't hanging out outside of your house in the middle of the night because the late spring frost killed their main food source.

It was a pretty freaky story and I definitely had the image of my head of sweet little FiFi barking its head off at big scary mama bear and the bear taking the dogs head off.

So I was carrying around that image in my head all day yesterday.

Around 2:30am, I woke up because Lucy was screaming her head off because she lost her pacifier in her crib and couldn't find it. When I came back to bed, I was settling in and I heard our garbage can get knocked over. My first thought was, "BEAR!" So I jumped out of bed, our motion detector light was on. I was peeking through the windows, but I couldn't see anything except that the garbage can was knocked over. Our window was slightly cracked and I could hear the bags rustling in the wind. I looked for a good three minutes for any sign of bears. I tried waking Matt up-but that was a wasted effort. Since I couldn't see anything, I just went to bed and I didn't hear anything else during the night.

This morning, I told Matt that I thought we might have had a bear outside of our house last night. He asked me why I didn't wake him up-hmph.

And then I went to let Slappy outside for her morning bathroom break and sure enough; garbage was strewn across our yard. Matt was kind enough to pick it all up as I have a delicate gag reflex. Otherwise I would probably still be out there picking up poopy diapers and old cantaloupe scraps and dry heaving the entire time.

All I can say is, I guess the bear really wanted my leftover 7-layer Cruncherito from Taco Bell that I had for dinner last night!