XBox Monster

Yesterday, I walked in the house with William from a morning out at Tony’s parent’s house. A thunking noise greeted us. Concerned that a cat had somehow managed to finangle himself into the kitchen cabinets, despite the child proofing that we’ve done, I went in the kitchen to check. Because that’s what it sounded like.

But there were no cabinet doors rattling, or opening and closing in an agitated manner of failing to open fully. I called out one of our cats’ names and the thunking stopped. Huh. So I waited a minute and the thunking started again. William shared his take on it, with a scared sounding, “It’s a monster, mommy! Please, keep me safe!” Great, just great. And where the heck did he learn about monsters, anyway?

“No, William, there are no monsters. It’s just a cat. Can you help me find the cat who’s stuck somewhere?” I’ve learned, even if I don’t know for sure, to state such things with confidence and boldness. It’s easier to retract something than to leave it open for interpretation. He wandered off looking for the cat… I was pretty sure there was a monster in the house.

After much intermittent thunking, I finally isolated the sound to the locked area where Tony’s XBox is kept. I unlocked the cabinet cover and looked inside. Thankfully no frightened cat came out of there. No defecation or urine smells greeted me, either. (That’s really important in our house, because it seem as if we close any door that they think should be open, they poop in front of it, YAY CAT POOP!) In fact, there really wasn’t any room for anything alive to fit in there and the thunking sound had stopped again. While I was still fairly well mystified by this, since the sound had stopped and all the cats were accounted for, I decided we would just go on with our merry day.

Later, Tony came home and mentioned something about the XBox disc tray was opening and closing on its own for some weird reason, which was thunking on the cabinet door, which sounded like a monster… or a cat stuck in a cabinet.

But I still don’t know how William knows about monsters.