Do you hear that?...

Something's in the chimney! Mom come quick! It's a bird! We think it's stuck in the chimney! My kids had to come get me to see cuz they were so excited. You could hear a bird whistling & chirping coming from the fireplace. I told them sometimes birds like to sit on the roof and whistle into the chimney. They each had flashlights trying to open the hatch and look for themselves. I had to tell them not to touch anything. Just as I was about to open the hatch, I heard the bird flapping around and the hatch was shaking & of course soot was flying everywhere. Nice. Anyway, I opened it and couldn't see anything. Then suddenly the bird came near the opening. After a few minutes, it flew into the fireplace. I closed the screen immediately so it wouldn't just fly into the house. I wanted to catch it and release it outside. It's a good thing that I didn't clean out the fireplace from last winter (we had lots of fires) so that everytime the bird was jumping around, tons of soot flew everywhere, especially my face! I could barely breathe. We also have this heat flow thing in the fireplace (it's bolted down I found out and looks like big pipes that suck in the heat of the fire & blow out the hot air at the top, it's also where you set the logs). Anyway it made it really hard to catch the bird with that thing in my way. That little stinker was also really fast & kept slipping out of my hands. Finally I caught it. Of course, the kids got all excited and wanted to play with it. ha ha. I told them we needed to let it go find it's family. It looked like it flew back to our chimney. Who knows? We didn't hear it anymore. All this happened when I was supposed to start dinner, so we had a quick dinner anyway. I mean the kids love quesadillas! That's always fun & easy. Well, that was our big excitement last night! Everyone had to shower to wash off the ash and I was left with clean up. I have to do more clean up today because apparently the soot doesn't like to wash off the floor very easily & it spread farther than I thought. I mopped all around the area last night but everyone kept having black on the bottom of their feet. Yuck! So, I get to clean more today. Lucky me! Anyway, here's a few pictures we took last night:

The hatch is open & the bird is in the chimney.

The bird is on the left under the pipe thing.

Here's the cute little birdie! (And all the ash on my arms, good thing Felicia didn't take a picture of my face! It was covered in black ash.)