On Feeding Raccoons.....

Has he learned his lesson?

No, no he has not.

He maintains that since he has now had a rabies vaccine, he is immune.

Well, maybe the dog food will convince them to stop eating my tomatoes.......

.......and baby raccoons are a little cute.....until they bite the hand that feeds them that is........

Catch and Release......

Well our little tadpole with the ridiculously long name is officially a frog....or toad....well, he's definitely some sort of amphibian.

Let's take a minute to really enjoy this picture.....just stop and soak it in............

......no really, go back and truly admire the fact that I got a clear picture of a swimming frog/toad/amphibian that shows both his arms and his legs through the glass.  It wasn't easy.

I kept having to shoo the children away.

 "No children, you may not look at our super interesting meta....metamorpha.......ummmm......metamorphasizing frog/toad/amphibian type creature.  Mommy is trying to capture this wonderful childhood memory so we can keep it forever and also put it on the internet so that everyone will know that I teach you important sciency things and see what a good mommy I am!"

Anyway, once he crawled up onto the land I figured it was only a matter of time before he would make a break for it so we gathered ourselves together for the big release....which turned out to be rather anti-climactic.

And also, on an unrelated side note, now that it's Florida summer again, I am battling the instant lens-fog-over every time I take my camera outside.  Does anyone have any tips?

Camera fog or no camera fog, Tom, Tom the Piper's Son enjoyed his new found freedom and we witnessed his very first hop....away from us and into the grass.  I have a feeling he is just the first in a long line of tadpoles...maybe next time we will find actual frog spawn...you know....if we're really lucky.

And if you're interested here are our favorite tadpole books from the random assortment we grabbed at the library:

                                                           

Critter Watch 2012: A Shocking Turn of Events.....

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen.

Chris' raccoon watching contraption-building culminated in this beauty.....complete with rain gutters and twinkling Christmas lights, because, you know, we'd hate to put something tacky in our yard......

The lights allowed us to see the raccoons really well.......

.......but unfortunately this familiarity also led Chris to the (mistaken) conclusion that the raccoons were indeed his friends.  That's right, he imagined himself as the Raccoon Whisperer and soon found himself sitting outside with all five critters surrounding him as he attempted to feed them dogfood......from his hand.

This in turn led to a late night walk over to the ER for a rabies vaccination.

Chris was stunned....he came inside and informed me that he was shocked that he'd been bitten....I couldn't believe that he was so surprised that a wild animal would bite him.  This did lead to very productive discussion with the boys though about the differences between wild and domesticated animals.....

I don't think the incident has put a damper on Chris's enthusiasm for all things raccoon, especially since I saw that he put "raccoon dog food" on our grocery list for next week.....but hopefully it's halted any more dreams of finding a raccoon baby and raising it as our own....

I blame Grandpa Reintjes for this.......how could a son grow up in a home where every stray animal was taken in, including a chipmunk who lived in his father's pocket, not want pet raccoons when the opportunity presents itself?

Thanksgiving Reintjes Style aka Critter Watch 2012

We were supposed to do Thanksgiving at one of our new friends' houses but their children fell contagiously ill and didn't want to spread around their disease so we had to make other last minute plans for our feast.....or in David's words "Thanksgiving was ruined".....

Since the commissary was out of turkeys, and Chris had already declared we should just have steak as it was just our little family eating, we had a scaled down version of Thanksgiving at home with steak, sweet potatoes, lots of cranberry sauce and stuffing (since that's what we were supposed to be bringing to dinner), homemade rolls (because they're delicious) and pumpkin pie from the freezer (because I need at least a weeks notice to gather up enough energy to make homemade pie).

As you can see, we had a very fancy, pants optional dinner......

But that wasn't the fun part.....the highlight of our day wasn't the food....it was the raccoons.....

Apparently this is how we do family time now....Chris spends his free time building beautiful structures such as this to adorn our backyard--complete with obstacles for our critters to overcome in order to get to their food--with the children's help of course.....

.......and then as soon as night falls we all gather round our back windows and wait......

Meet Patches, one of the five raccoons that have become our nightly visitors and source of endless excitement for husbands and children alike......

I hope you all had a Thanksgiving as wonderful and raccoon-full as we did--you know, if you're in to that sort of thing :)

Critters are for Catching....and Chasing.....

We enjoy the simple things around here.....reclaiming patches of woods for our yard, catching critters and listening to children cry over the fact that no, they cannot keep cockroaches and snakes for pets and then listening to them cry again because apparently when housed in the same container neither can live while the other survives......

In other news the boys have officially turned the train table that was relegated to the patio into their "dirt table."  I was envisioning more of an outdoor art project area but I suppose it was an inevitable turn of events what with the shovels we left out there for them to play with.....

We also gave the kids a planter so they could have a bit of a garden....it looked better before the critters got to it and we awoke to plants and dirt strewn about the rock pit....

On the other hand the planter destruction led to the quest to figure out what type of critter it was exactly who has been savaging our handiwork.  This quest in turn led to the placement of a wagon outside of our living room window with a ramp for the critter to climb up at which point he reaches another board next to a bucket that has to be knocked over in order to reach the dog food underneath.  The tipping bucket provides the sound that signals us to turn off all of the lights inside the house and crouch down next to the window to spy on the critter.

The mystery wasn't exactly solved as our trap has produced not one critter, but one possum and a pair of raccoon friends so far.....this has become a nightly pastime.....is my husband the only one who runs outside with a flashlight and the dog at the mere hint of a possible critter invasion just to see it and then chase it for fun?

Aside from critter sighting our second favorite current pastime centers around Chris' new baby, as seen above.....We've been sitting around for hours burning logs and pinecones and marshmallows among other things.......

Evenings well spent......PS it was the snake that slithered away to freedom....

Butterflies Are Not For Squishing

You can probably just prepare yourselves for two years of gratuitous pictures of the children at the zoo--we bought a membership and it's pretty much their favorite place to be.

This time we splurged and paid for the extras--the train ride, the carousel, the petting of the stingrays and.....the only one of the experiences that is actually worth paying extra for.....Butterfly Hollow......

We were the only ones inside and the butterfly keeper (notice all the butterflies on the underside of her hat) came over with a butterfly for David to hold.  His reaction was so precious and he was so excited to be holding the butterfly--he kept saying, "He likes me! He likes me!"  I however was terrified that this cute scene could turn horrifying at any moment.....unlike the butterfly keeper, I have seen up close how quickly my boys can go from sweetly observing nature to ruthlessly squishing nature and laughing maniacally.  Luckily David did no such thing and once he was done he just handed the butterfly back to safety....after I convinced him it really didn't want to go take a swim in the pond to cool off that is.

We also had great grandma with us which was so much fun.  The boys loved having her all to themselves and I loved having an adult to talk to in the evenings :)  

We also decided that we both need to plant this flowering bush/ground cover thing in our gardens.  I have seen it growing all over town so it can't be too high maintenance here and the zoo finally helped me to identify it.......but planting bushes is definitely mans' work, especially considering that all of the tools need to be dug out of our ridiculously stuffed full garage.....so that project will just have to wait......

Ant Farm Update

We've let our sneaky little ants free, but then that was probably their plan all along.  A few days after we made our little ant farm all ant activity appeared to cease, not an ant was to be found, and almost all the tunnels had collapsed.  I confirmed with Chris and we decided that the ants had most probably *ahem* not made it or were on their way to not making it.....What could we do but dump them out?

What we then discovered was that the ants had managed to lift the interior jar, move half of their dirt in and had taken up residence there instead.

*Note to self:  even though the tutorial said nothing about putting a lid on the interior jar it is indeed an essential step.*  

To be fair, this possibility had crossed my mind when we were constructing the original ant farm but I never save our jar lids much to Chris' chagrin.   You see in our town you have to pay for your trash but not your recycling.  Chris would have me put everything in the recycling bin....I however maintain that the lids are not labeled as recyclables so they should go in the trash.  Feel free to correct me--or more likely him :)--if you can settle this years long argument for us......

I've saved a couple of new jars with lids  so we will try again and hopefully our ants won't go into hiding this time.....

Our Farm

We got ambitious yesterday and decided to make a last minute ant farm.  I thought I took lots of pictures of the process...Chris digging into our front yard ant hill, the ants going everywhere (including up his pants!), the filling of the jar, David squeezing a ridiculously large dollop of honey on top, the boys sweetly holding up the finished product and smiling....but apparently I had neglected to put the memory card in my camera and then neglected to notice the warning that popped up after each photo that said there was.no.memory.card.  I'm a genius :)

Anyway, we used this tutorial that involved two jars with some holes poked in the top--it's really complicated :)  Then we dumped some worker ants and apparently some babies into said jar, added some food and closed the lid tight.

I never really got the whole ant farm thing and, as far as I can remember, I've never had one myself but this thing is amazing!  We've been watching the ladies digging furiously, making tunnels and moving what appear to be eggs all over the place--well eggs or some kind of food--we really have no idea......I do know though that all the worker ants are ladies and they only nap for a minute at a time for a total of 4.5 or so hours a day so that at any given time only 20% of a nest is resting.  I know you were dying to know that.....you're welcome.  We've been doing a lot of ant reading as of late and The Life and Times of the Ant is our current favorite and pretty much where all of my ant knowledge comes from....

Here are some replacement pics I took today of David loving on our newest pets......

You can kind of see the tunnels in this picture.......

....and here's a close up of the babies/potential food thingies.....We should probably work on our nature identification skills here.............

Well, I need to run and soak my fingers in some more lime juice--they are currently a fiery burning disaster from the jalapenos I was chopping up during naptime for our dinner.  Of course I wasn't wearing gloves--but to be fair I've never had a reaction like this before so I don't think it's entirely my fault.   Any suggestions for what to do with burning jalapeno fingers would be much appreciated.....and the next time you see me taking pictures feel free to ask if I do in fact have a memory card in my camera....apparently that's an important picture taking component.....Oh, and you should go dig up an ant hill.   Like right now :)