After a hectic couple of weeks and weekends, the interior of the car was looking rough and a suspicious smell was starting to emerge from the back seat. Upon arriving home early one afternoon, I informed the kids that the time had come to shovel all of last season's sports equipment, leftover homework packets, piles of barely worn sweatshirts and jackets, and the collection of half-empty water bottles out of the back seats. As my kids love to do, they complained vociferously.

I ran in the house and quickly grabbed a garbage bag and then sat barricading the doorway so they couldn't even think about going into the house until they had the car clean. In a few minutes, they had the sidewalk next to the house looking like a yard sale, and I had to run back in for another garbage bag.After they got the car cleaned out, they started sorting through the piles of stuff they had hauled out of the car and began trucking it into the house. At this point, I relaxed my station at the door and started to go about my own business.As my kids also love to do, they didn't bother closing the outside door between their many trips in and out, and within a matter of minutes, a curious little bird managed to find his way into our house.First, he flitted around the living room. Our favorite feline companion was lazily lounging on the ottoman, and didn't even bother to lift a paw. Unable to antagonize the cat, the bird continued up the stairs, and flew straight into the boys' room.On the one hand, we were able to slam the door and trap him in a relatively small space. On the other hand, the boys' room was in the same state as the car had recently been in, and now had the added bonus of everything the boys cleaned out of the car dumped on the floor.Our first attempt to get the bird out was to open all the windows in the room and hope that he would just fly out. Birdie had no interest in flying out of an open window. He was more interested in crashing into the upper part of the window that wasn't open. The kids started running around the room trying to scare him out, which succeeded only in terrifying him more. I quickly realized that three kids excitedly running around a room with four open windows, located on the third floor, with multiple trip hazards all over the place could go south quickly, so we put an end to that and tried to devise another plan to get the bird out.I sent A to get the large fishing net and I stationed the other two in the corner farthest away from the windows, with strict instructions not to move. While we were waiting for A to come back, I snapped a few pictures of Birdie on his new favorite perch, G's Spider-Man movie poster. When A got back with the net, I planned to stealthily sneak up on the bird, scoop him up with the net, and then dump him out the window.To sneak up on the bird's blind side, I had to crawl across A's bed, and then try to sweep the net over the bird while I jumped over to G's bed. That went about as smoothly as you might guess. At this point, G asked if he could hold my phone. I told him that I had already gotten some pictures of the bird. He informed me that he had no interest in photographing the bird, he wanted to video me trying to capture it.I did not let him have my phone.After several more attempts of me jumping back and forth between the boys' beds, and waving the net around like a mad woman, the bird finally flew into the glass window hard enough to stun himself. I scooped him up and tossed him out the window.As we returned downstairs, we discovered that in our haste to capture the bird, we had left all the doors open. Luckily, we had no more avian visitors, and the feline opted not to escape.Now, the kids have a new game. It's called "let's pretend we're Mom trying to catch a bird" and it involves jumping around on the beds very ungracefully. I've also caught them leaving doors open longer than necessary and making bird calls.It's times like this, I'm glad we don't live in the country, because if we did, I have a feeling our house would resemble Noah's Ark.Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.