A Raccoon Story

One Saturday in the early afternoon, our friends from the down the street (Mike and Katie) asked if Chris could come down and help Mike.  You see they believed that they had birds in their chimney and Mike needed some help getting them out.  Except they weren't birds - it was a mama raccoon and her 4 babies.

A few days earlier, Katie began noticing a nasty smell in the house.  Blaming it on her 2 young boys seemed like the obvious thing to do so that's just what happened.  But the noises.  Those weren't the 2 boys - it had to be birds in the chimney.  Yes, mama raccoon was no bird.

What began as an "easy" thing to do soon grew into a party.  Several neighbors came down to watch the spectacle.  We even brought out popcorn and other such snacks to eat in the chairs we had set out to watch.  Oh! I'm sure we were quite the sight.

After much debating and bringing on another neighbor to help, the guys decided to make a noose to grab the raccoons out of the chimney.  After poking and prodding and angering, the mama raccoon came out on her own all mad for ruining her new spot with her babies.  Would you believe that even with all our sitting and watching, only 1 person saw the mama raccoon make her exit?  Katie went in to feed baby Ben, Marilee went in to put some warmer clothes on (it was dreary and rainy that day), Elianna was riding a bike, Abe had just fallen down so I went to help him and BAM! that's when the excitement happened.  Bummer!

The baby raccoons were much easier to get out and put in the cage.  Mike and Chris ran them to the animal shelter since no one was either returning our calls or knew what to do with baby raccoons.  Oh what a day!

Mother's Day 2015

I had a marvelous Mother's Day!  It began with breakfast in bed of creme brûlée french toast.  Yes, it tasted just as good as it sounds!  After church, my Chris and Elianna made lunch of stuffed pork loin, carrots, and salad.  My Chris also made vegetable tulips made from tomatoes stuffed with a cucumber cream cheese mixture and finished off with "stems" of chives and spring onions.  I was super proud of him!  He did good!

Winter Park Weekend

One of Chris' fitness clients rents a house for 2 months in Winter Park and only goes up on the weekends.  She offered it to us for a week but since Elianna was still in school, we couldn't go an entire week (although that would have been nice!).  However, we took her out for one day (technically a half day) so we could spend some much needed time together.  We had no plans and did not really do much of anything.  We caught up on sleep, caught up on some TV watching and some generally laying around.  It.was.nice!!!  We did venture out into the snow but didn't stay out long since I hadn't planned very well and didn't take our snow clothes.  After much whining and crying (by Elianna mind me), we called it a day and went back inside to do some more lazing around.  Thank you to Ann and Jeff!

And then the Papi Man tried some snowboarding action.  He did pretty well for his 2nd ever time.  He's been several times out on the real-live slopes since this video and does very well!  He may just become a snowboarder instead of a skier.  

Easy Bake Faces

Grammy got Elianna an easy bake oven for Christmas.  Apparently, when you bake in your easy bake oven, it requires you to make crazy faces.