"Oh, Crap... DONKEYS!"

This morning was going in the normal fashion: Jack's alarm goes off, he hits the snooze, the alarm goes off again, he hits the snooze, (rinse and repeat).  So we were in that twilight zone of being half-asleep / half-awake when both of the dogs look out the bedroom window and go NUTS.

The dogs do this on a semi-regular basis - a deer in the woods, a car driving by, a leaf fluttering in the wind - it's all a good reason to bark their heads off at any time of day or night.

So we go through all the motions of telling the dogs to be quiet and working with them to calm down.  Once that's done, I sit up and blearily look out the bedroom window myself.  Nothing but woods.

Jack, laying down and trying to capture one more moment of peace and quiet before getting up and heading to work, mutters, "Do you see anything out there?"

I glance around and tell him, "Naw, I don't see - Oh, crap... DONKEYS!"

My mother-in-law has donkeys, and as I sat there I saw ALL FOUR DONKEYS saunter out of our backyard.  I leapt out of bed and raced outside to try and grab them while Jack jumped up (heh) and ran to call his mom to alert her that the donkeys had somehow gotten out of the neighbor's pasture they've been staying in recently.

In my pajamas and without my glasses I chased after the donkeys, who weren't having any of it.  They took one look at me and decided that freedom was just way too much fun and trotted off in the opposite direction.

I guess the dogs really did have something to bark about this time.