Adventures of the Cupboard Dwellers: There's a WHAT in your closet??

She bobbed into my room, running that cute 2-year-old run, and stopped abruptly.
"MAMA," she said, eyes and hands wide,
"There's a yizard in my cwoset!!"
I kinda smiled, but mostly just shook my head, sure she was trying to get out of doing whatever it was I'd asked her to do.
"B, there is not a lizard in your closet," I sighed. We'd just gotten back from vacation and the kids were testing their limits for sure.
"Yes, there is! There IS a yizard in my cwoset!" she insisted, eyes somehow even wider than before. Just as I was about to say that, no, there couldn't possibly be a lizard in her closet; her big brother came in.
"There is a lizard, Mama," he told me.
Ok. Now I really did have to check it out...this one wouldn't tell me there was a lizard in his sister's closet in order to get out of getting dressed. He's much more up-front about stuff like that...no imaginary lizards there, just outright defiance. (Much simpler to tell when it's real or not, you know)

"Ok. Show me." we trundled off down the hall, Blythe bobbing in front all the way to her closet, where they knelt and showed me....

a lizard. A teeny, tiny, two-inch-long lizard. In my daughter's closet.
"See?? A yizard!!" (It's impressive, really, how high her voice can get when she's excited or insistent-no microphone needed for her!)
I stared at it for a minute, realizing that:
a) The teeny, tiny, two-inch-long lizard was very much alive and quite fast and
b) I had to catch it. As in right then. As in, I couldn't call the hubs with a cute story about a lizard in the closet and then wait until he came home from work to catch it. Or find some other boy to catch it, as I'd done in Brazil with frogs in the shower and giant moths the size of my face in my bedroom. I also realized that
c) This whole thing was deja vu...only when I was a little girl, it was a bat in the basement that started flying at me and it was my mother saying, "Oh, Kristin, there's not a bat in the basement..."
      I silently vowed that I'd never say  try very hard not to ever say those words to my children again; and then went in search of lizard-catching gear. And what, exactly, is lizard catching gear? Good question!
     A few minutes later, armed with a small Tupperware and a sturdy sheet of paper, I was back, clearing the kids away from where they sat ogling the lizard. Why didn't I just let Pax catch him, you ask? Well, although not at all squeamish about that kind of thing, the biggest Small Son is not exactly gentle with bugs...and lizards are a good thing-we just want them outside. Squashing it is more his style, as he proved with yizard # 7 last night. So I stifled my inner shrieking girl (turns out I'm surprizingly girly when it comes to catching lizards), captured the yizard under my tupperware, shimmied the paper in till our little friend was snug inside, and then sat and looked at him with my kiddos, amazed at how tiny and yet how perfect he was. Also kinda see-through. Which was kinda weird.
    Then I took him outside, released him...
and promptly called my husband's voice mail to tell him what I'd just done. Yes, I needed affirmation. See, we don't deal with this kind of thing in Colorado...yizards in the closet. Moths everywhere, yes. Spiders, absolutely (especially if you have a basement) Mosquitos, sure. But not yizards. And I would just like to say, thanks so much for this new experience, desert!! (or not.) Since then we've found no fewer than seven of the little guys at various times in our house. They're so teeny, they can get in anywhere...and my yizard catching skills are quite good, thankyouverymuch.
At least it wasn't a scorpion....