Raccoon!

We had quite a strange night Saturday. Brecklen, Hannah, and I were watching a movie before bed and just as it was about to end I saw something moving in the corner of my eye coming down the stairs and stop about 5 feet from us. It moved like a cat and a thought to myself , how did a cat get into our house? Well it wasn't until I really looked at the animal I realized it was not a cat, but a raccoon! I screamed so loud I am sure that Aric thought someone died. This thing was huge, about 2 feet long. This animal was clearly just as scared as me. As I was screaming bloody murder Aric heard me say something about a raccoon and ran into the room to catch it. It freaked out and ran across our living room up a shelf , knocked down a picture on the wall, fell to the ground, ran across the room again right past Aric, ran down the hall and into our study. Aric slammed the door to trap the thing in.

Meanwhile I picked up the kids and sprinted upstairs to our bedroom so that the kids would be safe. Thank goodness the animal ran to our study which is in our basement. Aric just opened the window from the outside and the raccoon ran out, of course he had to climb over everything first. I am glad it didn't take long for the raccoon to leave the house. He left quite a mess though. I had no idea that they are such climbers!

As I ran upstairs to take the kids to safety I noticed that the garage door was ajar. When things calmed down I looked into the garage and saw paw prints all over my car. And he made quite a mess of the garage as well. It had been raining off and on all day and he must have come into our garage during the day and got trapped when we shut the garage door. He obviously managed to push the door open which probably wasn't hard since it wasn't closed tight, what are the chances of that? We were all a little freaked out and we decided to investigate the upstairs to see if he made a mess up there too. Brecklen thought it must have slept in his bed, so we looked in his room and I was relieved to see that it did not appear that our little visitor was there. I think he is still convinced that the raccoon was in his room. Poor Hannah. She kinda freaked out at my reaction and started crying. While we were looking around the house for signs of poop, or hair, Hannah just Kept saying "Raccoon chasing me", but it was so cute and hard to not laugh because it sounded like "accoon tasing me." We tried to make it less scary for her and had a stuffed animal that looked like a raccoon to give to her. We decided to name him Rocky the Raccoon. I don't think they had nightmares.

I was partly worried there might be another one trapped in the house and it would just pop out at me any moment. Thank goodness no sign of anymore animals, and no poop anywhere. I really did not want to clean up any poop from an animal. As it is I have a hard time not throwing up because of "morning" sickness when my own child poops , let alone a raccoon.

We didn't think that the raccoon went upstairs, but the next day I found paw prints on the side of our fridge, and there was animal hair on the top of the fridge. I kinda panicked. How long was it in our house? It was so quiet, we never knew it was there. I was about to take the kids upstairs when the raccoon decided to come downstairs, what if we had scared it coming up stairs and it really flipped out and attacked one of my kids? What if it decided to go to sleep in my bed and I woke up with some furry thing next to me? All the craziest scenarios went through my mind. We really did get lucky, it was not rabid, or angry, just curious and scared. It approached us instead of us stumbling upon it and feeling the need to defend itself. Well that's not something that happens everyday, in our house atleast.