What. The. Heck. Raccoons.

Around here, we used to really really dislike raccoons. They tear up our lawns and frighten our children and keep us awake at night with their chattering and dig through our trash and make big messes in our yard. We used to  dislike them, now we hate them....

Last night while Dylan and I were watching some two-day-old dvr-ed Olympics, we heard someone walking around in our kitchen (God bless our noisy kitchen floor!). Of course our first thought was that one of the children must have snuck out of their rooms, but they would have had to walk right past us to do this so it wasn't likely. When we stood up and turned around, we saw a RACCOON running out of our kitchen. WHAT. THE. HECK! It ran back through the family room, over several nerf guns and bows and arrows, and paused at our broken screen door, then went outside. Dylan ran to find his pellet gun (that he bought soely for this purpose) and I scrambled to find my camera. The little stinker popped it's head back through the screen just as I was taking the lens cap off my camera, but ran away before I could take a picture. We went out back with a flashlight and the pellet gun but saw no sign of it except for some piles of dirt from where it was digging up our lawn.

As I was trying to sleep last night, I kept thinking about how many times I've come out in the middle of the night for one reason or another and realized that as we were locking up, we left the slider open and just had the broken (as in ripped off the frame on two sides so that it blows in the wind and the kids can just walk through it without bothering to open it) screen door closed. In fact, just the night before I was laying on the couch all night trying to console my screaming, teething, stuffy-nosed baby. Maybe the door was open then? What if I came out in the middle of the night for a drink of water and was attacked by a hungry raccoon? What if this raccoon has been coming in every night? What if it tried to eat my children? What if it was having babies in my house?

Basically, I think it's time that we get the screen door fixed. Or at least remember to close our doors at night.