The Raccoon: Nature 1, Pam 0

I was over 8 months pregnant with Melody, lying on the couch with my feet up as far as they could go to try and get my ankles to reappear.  For those that saw my feet then, it was scary, but nothing seemed to help.  So I'm lying there, enjoying a warm spring day with the screen door open on the front door.  I see something run past the door, and look to see which neighborhood cat has decided to hang out and bother Slim Kitty.  I turn my head to look closer, and I see a cute little raccoon face look at me.  I sit up on the couch to call Rob into the room, when the raccoon breaks through the bottom of our screen door and walks in the house.  I now leap up on the couch, and start jumping around with arms flailing screaming, "Raccoon!  Raccoon!"  Rob comes running down the hall to see what the crazy pregnant lady is screaming about, and he comes face to face with the thing and he screams, "Aahh!  A raccoon!"  OK, so he may have used a few more colorful words, but you get the idea.  As luck would have it, the basement door was open, so as Rob came flying down the hallway, the raccoon ran through the kitchen and into the basement.  Great.  Rob goes down to try and chase him out, and in those few minutes the raccoon had found a bag of garbage we had brought down a little bit before to put in the can.  So our friendly raccoon is munching on a meatball and Rob goes down tot get him out of the house.  Apparently raccoons do not take kindly to people getting too close to them while they are eating meatballs and the thing starts growling at Rob.  He backs up while I start screaming something about rabies and get that thing out of the house.  So, Rob goes back upstairs, out the front door to open the garage and starts throwing cookies at the raccoon to lure him through the garage and again out of the house.  It's a very good thing that raccoons like cookies more than meatballs because he fell for Rob's trap.  The raccoon hung around for a bit more that day.  He climbed up on the roof at one point, ran around the back yard some.  Then finally found a home in the dead tree behind our house.  The tree was deck level, and every now and then if we were grilling something, we would see that little face peek out of the tree hole and watch to see if we were sharing with him.  Not likely!