Midnight Excitement

A bit of history: The daughter of one of our neighbors (we'll call her AH) has been in Paris for the last several months working on her MBA in International business... she is home for the summer even though her mom has been living on the East Coast and the house has been vacant for almost a year with the exception of the 2 kids coming and going at random intervals.

So the latest of my husband's favorite things to do is when we are about to go to sleep at night he knocks on the headboard and makes Bailey go crazy thinking someone is at the door.... yeah, he is pretty ornery.

So the other night, I am trying to sleep when I hear him doing this... Bailey goes crazy, then calms down, then he does it again... lather, rinse, repeat... this went on for about 15 minutes before he got bored... then I was out like a light.

A little later, I hear him doing it again, accompanied by Bailey barking like mad... I was about to get really ticked off when I realized the knocking was actually coming from the front door and it was more of an insistent banging than a knock. I feel him get up and head to the door... Then I hear a female voice in an absolute panic. I get up and head that way too...

Turns out, AH had been home alone when she got a text message that said "I'm here... unlock the door." She said she gets messages like that a lot and she just replies that they have the wrong number... but this time it really gave her the creeps. Whereas she typically just turns on the alarm before she heads to bed, she decided to go ahead and lock all the doors as well (something rarely done in our neighborhood). She had just locked one of the doors and headed to the other when she heard the beep of the alarm signaling that a door had opened... then the alarm was tripped and she froze, until the system voice came on and said "Get out of the house NOW!" and she thought "OK" and she took off out the door she was standing in front of... our house was the closest and she knew we were home.

So my husband grabs his gun and flashlight and heads over to check things out while she calls her mom (the one who the alarm company would call to inform that the alarm was tripped) to let her know she was out of the house, safe at our place, and that she was calling the police.

My husband came back and said he didn't see anything but that the dog, a standard poodle named Lu Lu, was about to lose her mind and snarled if he even got remotely close to her... so they headed over together to get the dog then came back to wait for the police.

Bailey and Lu Lu were so happy to play, they were oblivious to us heading outside to meet the cops. The police checked things out and found nothing... but they said that the door that tripped the alarm was unlocked but not open while 2 other doors were locked but not completely closed so they were able to easily push them open. The unlocked door was the one AH had just locked a minute or 2 before the alarm went off... we never did figure out how it came to be unlocked...

AH was really shaken up (not surprising given the events of the early morning hours and her history of being stalked as a undergrad and nearly being kidnapped last spring while in Paris) so we fixed her up a bed so she could stay the night with us instead of going home to the big empty house... although an hour later, her brother convinced her to stay with him, which was only 10 minutes away...

The whole thing was so strange... our neighborhood is so quiet that we would have heard footsteps running away or a car starting over the hill or around the corner and we heard nothing... And between my husband, Lu Lu, and the cops, it was clear there was no one in the house... very, very strange...

So that was our excitement for the week...

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31 weeks today... lots of Braxton-Hicks and a few really uncomfortable contractions...