Now that I’ve finally mostly gotten the baby to sleep through the night, my body doesn’t know what to do with all this extra sleep and I find myself tossing and turning when I used to be nursing the baby.  As I was lying awake in bed at 2:30 one morning, I start hearing what sounds like a tapping noise under my bed.  My first thought is water, but I know there are no pipes under my bed or even on the wall where I sleep.  My second thought is bug.  I want to ignore it.  Just go back to sleep.  But this constant tap, tap, tap is driving me insane.  I get my phone and turn the flashlight on.  I look underneath my bed.  All I can think is, this is a scene from a horror movie.

Of course living in a small house, I store stuff under the bed so I can’t actually see anything.  I move a backpack out of the way so I can see better.  The tapping stops for a minute.  I wishfully think maybe the heat did something to some object under the bed and it’s decompressing or some such thing.  Then the tapping starts back up.  It is then that I realize it is coming from my backpack.  I open up the backpack and shine the flashlight into all the little compartments.  I can’t see anything.

My husband is snoring next to me, blissfully unaware of what’s going on.  Not wanting to wake him up, I take the backpack and put it in the living room just wanting to get back to sleep.  I get back into bed and I don’t hear the tapping anymore, but at this point, my imagination is running wild and I have to find out what is making that noise.  So I get up and take the backpack into the bathroom and turn the light on.  I still can’t find anything.  I put the bag on the ground and I step all over it.  The tapping stops.  I get off the bag, the tapping starts back up.  I feel like a crazy person, although at what is now 3 something in the morning, I probably am half crazy.  I’m starting to rethink not waking up my husband.  I narrow down the tapping to the small pocket in the front of the backpack. I can actually feel the tapping through the bag.  I look again and there it is tucked in the corner, some kind of bug that presumably wants to get out.  I try to dump the bag upside down, but he’s holding on and not coming out.  I grab some toilet paper and try to pull him out that way.  I probably could have grabbed it with my hands, but that was not going to happen especially since I didn’t know what kind of bug it was, but I had to get it. So I took a pair of tweezers and grabbed at him.  That got his attention and he wanted out.  I was able to dump the bag upside down again and get him to come out.  I think it was a beetle of some kind. Whatever it was, I smooshed it with a little too much pleasure and flushed it down the toilet for good measure. I’ve always shaken out my shoes because you know scorpions, but now I have to add making sure I zip all my zippers too.  So it was more of a tap and not a thump.  I really don’t ever want to see the bug that wakes me up with a thump.