The thing that lived in the sofa

From the home of a large suburban family.....  Comes a shocking TRUE story of the 'Thing that lived in the sofa'!

No, it wasn't the mouse.  Thank-God for that!  No, hes living behind my dishwasher and sneaking into my pantry to destroy my food.  Yes, we are getting a REAL mouse trap tonight.

All I wanted to do was vacuum.  I am beginning to see a pattern emerge in my life.  It always starts out so simple.  The cushions on the sofa had to be fixed first.  For some reason they weren't sitting on the sofa right so I took them off and discovered the problem.  The kids had pulled back the cover and the foam from the springs.  My sofa is old, I do know I need a new one.  Just waiting till I have some extra money.  Anyway, so I happened to glance inside the sofa.  Have you ever looked inside a sofa?  There is a lot of room in there.  If you ever need to hide that would be a good place.  What did I see in there? A book.  You know if a book fit in there other things were probably in there too.   I pulled the foam back some more.  Yup, more stuff. I pulled out what I could and put it in the coffee table.

Thats the book, a snappi, a stapler, a spoon, a colored pencil, a red pen, a crayon, a domino, a straw, 2 pencils, a piece of paper, some broken toy and a calculator.  Not pictured: a nickle, balloon and 3 more pencils.

I couldn't see the other half of the sofa so I just stuck the vacuum in there figuring that would finish the job.

Yea, probably not the best idea I've had.  I should have thought that if a book was in there, chances are I would suck up something that shouldn't be in a vacuum.

I finished with the sofa and finally started on the floor.  Pretty soon the vacuum wasn't sucking right.  I thought it was just that rock I sucked up.  Yes, I know I probably shouldn't have sucked that up but it shouldn't have been in the house either.  After smacking the vacuum against the floor a few times (because we all know to get things to work properly we need to smack and shake it) the rock fell out.  However the vacuum still wasn't running right.

The 'thing that lived in the sofa' has attacked my vacuum. In swoops the one brave soul to fight the 'thing that lived in the sofa'.  That'd be me.   I take off the hose and can see a spiderman head.  I tried to pull it out.  Wasn't budging.  I got the tweezers and pulled.  Still wasn't budging.  I tried the smack and shack, nope no good.  I thought I'd give dh's trick a try.  He takes the hose out back to spin it, centrifugal force (another science lesson for the kids ala Newtons laws applied to families).  Well that wasn't even working. Spidey was really stuck.  Time to call in his amazing friends!  Oh no wait, I'm the hero in this story.  Fine, I had to do this the hard way.  I crimped and pushed, crimped and pushed till spidey flopped onto the ground. 'The thing that lived in my sofa'? 

Yea, a tooth brush.  I sucked up a tooth brush, which was inside my sofa.  I don't know whats more amazing, that it actually got sucked up or that it was living inside my sofa.

I'm not sure what the lesson of this is.  Don't look inside your sofa? Don't stick your vacuum where it doesn't belong?  Get rid of that nasty sofa before you are looking at the insides?  At any rate, my sofa is once again safe from things living inside it.  For now.