Hit the Road Jack... and by Jack I mean Raccoon.

So, as you all know from my last post, I had a mama raccoon and her baby living in the area around my hot tub. Awesome. Now, here is the true story about what we did to finally rid ourselves of our unwanted guests.
We have this amazing home teacher, Mike, who rarely visits our home to share a message, instead he comes over every couple of months to help us with some problem or other. He was the one who initially caught and carried out the Rat from our crawlspace (I don't want to talk about it), and then he came over and hung a light fixture in my kitchen, and he rebuilt the bench on our deck, so it was only natural that we call him when we needed help with our newest problem. So, a couple weeks ago Mike came over one morning, and he and Jesse jammed broom handles into the den, (previously known as our hot tub) and banged all around it and decided that the coons must not be in there anymore, so they sealed up the hole where the Raccoon was getting in and out of. Later that night the mama raccoon, in desperation, broke out of the sealed hot tub. Apparently they were just being really quiet. So we piled some of our kid's toys up against the new hole, to make in more inconvenient for mama to get in - although we now understood that she was pretty serious about living there. It was at this point that Jesse conveniently went away on business for a week. So I bolted all the doors covered all the windows and pretended we didn't even have a backyard.
When Jesse got home he knew he had to find a way to get the mama and the baby out, and THEN seal it all up, but how?? We decided to make a party of it all, and invited Mike and his family and our other good friends Candise and Kevin and their kids over for dinner and a raccoon hunt. Everyone chatted and ate tacos, and then the wives and kids all went to the park while the men stood around with a rake, a bat and shovel and tried to figure out how best to get the coons out. They decided to drill holes in the back part of the hot tub where the raccoons were camping out, and then they rammed the broom handle in the hole and sprayed febreeze in. Then they heard a deep rumbling growl, apparently they now had the mama's attention. The kept spraying stuff in there until the mama finally stuck her head out. Wisely, the men backed off and let her make the next move. When she decided they weren't going to hurt her she called in for her baby to come out, and that's when we found out she had FIVE babies in there with her. Apparently the babies were really cute and loved playing with all the toys on the deck, and just like human children, it took the mom a long time to gather them all up into one group at the bottom of our fence. Then the mama took each baby one at a time in her mouth and climbed over the fence and hid them somewhere - presumably in one of our neighbors hot tubs.
HORRAY! I am so happy to be done with them all. And so happy that neither the raccoons or any of us were harmed in the process.
Now I just have to deal with the bird that is stuck in my fireplace. Fantastic, I love being a home owner.

The Raccoon

We have been painting the outside of our house (pictures to come), so Jesse went around tearing pieces of our house off that he thought were rotten, and then talking of plans to replace and fix it all...we'll see. Anyways, he tore a piece of the surrounding off our hot tub off , and since it made no difference to the hot tub, he said he would replace later. A couple days later, we were out in the backyard - still painting - and I saw Tommy walk over to a very small grey fluffy thing. Then I saw him reach down to pick it up. I watched him put his had right on it to pick it up, and meanwhile my brain was trying to figure out what the little fuzz ball was that wasn't running or hopping away from my 4-year-old boy. Just as my brain registered the coloring we all heard a hissing coming from the bushes by Tommy, and then the Mama raccoon came out just as I started yelling for Tommy to come back into the house. We all got in the house behind the sliding door just in time to watch the mommy coon pick up the baby coon and jump into the hole by our hot tub left there after Jesse tore that piece of wood off. seriously?!!

So long story short, we have mama and baby raccoon living in the dark warm area around our hot tub, and we keep a shovel by the back door - to protect us in case the mama comes out. Of course it costs minimum $245 to get someone to catch the raccoons, so Jesse is planning his own Raccoon Catching Mission, we'll see. We'll see.