wildlife adventures

We had a couple of wildlife encounters here this week. First came the grasshopper. We found him clinging to the wall, halfway up the stairs last weekend. T expressed a desire to keep it so we found a container and D trapped him. We gave him some leaves to eat and some water and he/it seemed content to hang out as T's pal. The following day, another grasshopper appeared in the doorway to T's room. Initially I thought the original grasshopper had escaped from the container, but this was not the case. The second grasshopper moved in with the first and all was well for a couple of days. Yesterday, there was a big puddle of brown water at the bottom of the grasshopper habitat and no grasshoppers. T came to me with the container and I told him to go to D. So down he went. I heard D telling T - grasshoppers don't live very long - these ones have died so we'll go put this in the garden. T came back upstairs and reported to me "Daddy couldn't fix them". Oh dear.

Then the other night I woke up to a strange scraping noise coming from the back yard - with the heat all the windows have been wide open. I lay there in the darkness trying to identify the noise. Finally it came to me - racoons in the yard playing with T's water toys - scraping the plastic along the patio bricks. D realized it at the same time. Then we heard the squeak of the racoons getting in and out of the wading pool so we got up and went outside and shooed them away - 3 racoons peeking out at us from behind the wading pool at 3:46 AM. Back we went to bed. About 15 minutes later, they were back. Squeaking and splashing so D went down and shooed them off with a broom this time - this time they stayed away. I can live without middle of the night racoon pool parties...