“Please try to find it,” I said to my husband as I walked out the front door with our son to take him to our babysitter’s house before I headed off to work.

A few days a week, my husband and I have opposite work schedules. While I was headed out the door to drop off Landon and go to work, my husband was just getting home to go to sleep after a long night at work. 

It had been a long night at home, too.

From an outside view, it was probably a comical one. I can laugh about it now, too, but when I was actually going through it, it was anything but comical.

Let me preface this story by saying that before last week one of the most terrifying things I have ever had in my house was an occasional spider or even worse, a centipede. You know, those are the ones with tons of long legs that quickly scurry away when you try to catch them. I shudder even thinking about them.

That night we got a surprise from another unexpected guest.

My son and I had gone to sleep, and a few hours later — around 1 or 2 in the morning — Landon woke up crying. He didn’t fall back to sleep right away, so we went downstairs and each of us fell asleep on one of the couches. Before doing that, though, I let our dog out of the house to use the bathroom.

Fast forward a few hours later, and around 4 a.m. I hear Landon roll off of the couch and begin to cry again. I picked him up, nervous he had re-injured his collarbone that he had broken a few months before.

After a minute or two of consoling him, I see something out of the corner of my eye — something that was flying in the house!

My son looks up at it terrified, only to begin wailing as he asks, “What’s that?”

By that point I realized we had a bat in the house, and let’s be honest, I was terrified, too. I froze, not knowing what to do to get it out of the house.

Meanwhile, the bat was flying in circles around the living room. I grabbed a broom, and begin swatting at it so we could run past and flee back upstairs. At the time, it seemed like the best solution to get Landon out of there when he was already screaming and crying. I hoped it would still be there when we returned.

An hour or so later, Landon had finally fallen back asleep and I crept back downstairs to see if I could muster the guts to try to resolve the situation.

The bat was no longer flying around the living room but was sitting perched up on the top of one of our windows.

“OK, good,” I thought to myself. I thought if I could just check on it periodically, and make sure it wasn’t moving, my husband could handle it when he got home.

I walked into our kitchen and went to get a few things done to get ready for the day, but when I returned the bat was nowhere to be found.

I shuddered. It will probably come back out again tonight, I thought, and then I’ll have to deal with it then.

By that point, I needed to finish getting ready and then wake up Landon, who was sleeping peacefully, so we could leave.

That all went smoothly, and we left.

About an hour later, I receive a photo message from my husband. It was a photo of the bat caught in a Tupperware container.

“Yes!” I exclaimed when I saw it. It was nastier-looking than I thought, and I was so relieved to see that Jason was letting it out of the house and I wouldn’t have to worry about returning to the house.

I am still not 100 percent sure how the bat got in. We have checked for holes in the house it might have been able to get through, but have not found anything.

Right now, I’m hoping it simply slipped in as I let the dog out. I’m crossing my fingers that was it.

Sarah Stultz is the managing editor of the Tribune. Her column appears every Tuesday.