HEEBIE JEEBIES

Last Friday was a day pretty much like any other day.

At 5:30am, my alarm went off for work. I snoozed for 20 minutes and then mustered the energy to haul my big baby belly out of bed to get moving for the day. I got dressed, poured a cup of OJ to go (AGH how I miss my coffee!!), grabbed a granola bar, and headed into work. Work was work. Nothing crazy. I left at 3 – my boss has gotten worried that I’ll either go into labor at the office or in rush hour traffic, so she sends me home early. Love it. Everything about that day was pretty much the norm until a few hours after I got home.

I got home from work, picked up around the house, Kevin and I went for a walk before dinner, and then I got on the computer to catch up on blog reading and Perez while Kevin got ready to go to the Rockets game. Kevin came into our study to kiss me bye and to ask me, for probably the 5th or 6th time since I’d been home, if I was SURE that baby wasn’t coming that night. And my answer was the same answer I’d given him the other 5 or 6 times - “Baby’s not coming. He’s staying in there forever. I’ve given up. Go to the game. Have fun. Just be sure to check your phone every now and then, in case baby decides to surprise us.” Sidenote: Everyone was on edge baby-wise that night. If there was ever a night for me to go into labor, that was the worst night for it to happen. So, of course, everyone just knew it would be that night. My parents and my hubby would be at the Rockets game. My bff and her family would be at the Astros game, just down the street from the Rockets game. 99% of my support system were going to be nearly an hour away from 38-week-pregnant Chandra. So all assumptions were that I would go into labor and send everyone into a tizzy trying to get back up to the north side of town.

But I digress… *Bet you thought I was about to start my labor and delivery story. Sorry. No such luck – baby’s still holding tight in my belly.

So Kevin kisses the top of my head. I tell him to have fun and kind of brush him off, very much in my Perez Hilton reading “zone”. He walks out the front door and before he can even get around the corner to our driveway, I hear him yell. It catches my attention for just a second – Kevin’s not usually one to let out random hollers. Still in my Perez “zone”, I just roll it off as either excitement about the Rockets playoff game or relief of temporarily escaping a house filled with pregnancy hormones. Regardless, he deserved a night free of pregnant Chandra so I let his yell of excitement go.

Until he walked through our garage door a minute later, breathless and white as a ghost. My heart sank – “What’s wrong?” He opened the study blinds that look out into our front yard – the window is right behind a flower bed outside our front door – and pointed down in the flower bed. And there lay a big, fat, brown and black snake. I’m talking BIG. A good 4 feet long, and easily as thick as my arm. I screamed. Are you KIDDING?! I started yelling at Kevin, asking him what we were supposed to do. There is this huge f-ing snake right outside our front door – what in God’s name were we going to do? He starts yelling at me to get my pistol. I don’t have it! My dad borrowed it the weekend before to teach my sister how to shoot. Okay… do we have a garden hoe? Nope. Okay, no problem. My hubby decides to get his machete – yes, MACHETE – to kill the snake. Why do we own a machete? Because in my husband’s opinion, it’s much more fun to clear overgrowth and trim trees with a machete. Whatever. So he starts off to find his machete. And all I can think of is this snake biting off his arm while he’s trying to kill it. No thanks, I’d like my husband and father of my child to have all of his limbs intact if at all possible. So I scream at him “NO MACHETE! NO MACHETE!” *Apparently, the formation of proper sentences was beyond my comprehension at this point. So he comes back at me with “Well, then what do YOU want to do?”. I’m already on it – googling animal control services in the Houston area. Apparently, getting a hold of ANYONE at 6:30 on a Friday evening is impossible. But really, shouldn’t animal control be a 24-hour kind of deal? What if you wake up in the middle of the night to a kangaroo breaking into your home? It’s happened. Not to me – to someone in Australia. But it’s a true story. Stop rolling your eyes.

So no gun, no hoe, no machete, and no animal control. We resigned to staring at the behemoth through the window and front door, pacing between the two as if that would make some kind of difference. And then, all of a sudden, the snake was on the move. I screamed again, like the pansy little girl that I am. It slithered out of the flower bed, across our front yard, and into the wooded lot next to our house (presumably where it came from in the first place).

There was nothing left to do, really. Just hope and pray that it wouldn’t come back. Kevin left for the game, and I set up post in the middle of my living room so that I could see him coming from any angle. Because I knew that this snake had it out for me. It was his mission in life to get me. Or at least that’s how I felt. I went through the house, putting toilet seat lids down and blocking all sink and drainage openings into the house. Paranoid, much? Yes. But tell me you wouldn’t have done differently if you were home alone with a snake right outside.

It’s been a week since the big debacle. And we haven’t seen that snake since. Kevin killed a smaller one a few days after the big incident, but not the giant. We look for him every time we’re outside. I scan the yard for “dark patches” before I let Baxter out to play. Before we walk out the front door, we both check the flowerbed through the window. I’ve had nightmares of him slithering up into bed with us. *Granted, my pregnancy dreams have been insanely vivid and “out there”. Just thinking about it makes every hair of mine stand on end.

And thus I have an addition to one of my many life lists –

Things I am deathly afraid of:

-Tornadoes

-Ghosts

-Flying roaches

-SNAKES