Down Doggy!

For my next few blogs I am dying to share with you some of my craziest and funniest experiences that I have had with my little brothers.

This blog is about Levi.

When Levi was younger, he had a bit of an issue on making it to the bathroom. (Whoah! Gross, no one wants to hear a story about that! Bare with me here. I promise this blog has nothing to do with fecal matter.) Anyways, my parents were running out of options to help Levi with the potty training issue. The last resort: bribery. On the very top shelf in our bathroom cupboard was a plastic box filled with all sorts of goodies. There was candy, those cheap little toys you get at the dollar store, and Levi’s favorite: animal figurines. Simply, every time Levi did you know what in the correct you know where, he got a toy from the box.

Overtime Levi collected a pretty good portion of little animal toys. Every time he got a new one he would break it in by acting out some crazy story with it. There was Spirit the mustang and Simba the lion of course. Then there was the grand celebration for each creature: an entire chain of animals from one end of the house to the other as if there was a mass exodus originating from Levi’s bedroom.

One Saturday our family was doing our usual afternoon rituals. Mom was multi-tasking the garden and the laundry, dad and Eric had gone to run some errands in town, and Levi of course was playing with his animals. While I was in my room watching tv, I heard Levi call for mom a couple of times but I figured she had already taken care of it. When my favorite show had ended I still heard Levi yelling. Ughh I said, mom must be outside. I better go see what he wants. So I walked downstairs and called his name a few times, to which he responded. There was only one problem. Every room I went to I could hear him responding!

Doing my phenomenal eleven year old detective work, I discovered his voice was resonating from our abnormally large furnace ducts in our old farm house. I checked every room downstairs and finally, in the living room, I found two little legs sticking straight out of the floor. Levi had taken the cover off the vent to make the ultimate setting for his animal narratives. His new little dog figurine decided to take a dive into the great hole of soot so Levi’s natural response was to dive after his companion.

Just in time mom walked in the door. Scrambling to find words, my preteen response was something like, “Levi’s legs out of animal toy…hole in the floor…furnace..ahh!!” My mom followed my frantic pointing finger to the little legs sticking out of the floor, sending her in a dart to pull him out. For a solid ten minutes she held Levi’s legs trying to get him out of the black abyss. I asked if I should call 911.

In a few minutes the ambulance, fire department, and channel two news all appeared at our door step. In walked a deputy who ran in and grabbed Levi by the legs and in about five minutes, out of a dust of black soot we found Levi! His face was literally pitch-black with the exception of the white of his eyes and little tears lines streaming upward from them.

That evening we informed dad of our eventful day sat down for the five-o’clock news, starring the headline: “Little boy gets trapped in a furnace duct when his eleven year old sister calls 911”