PB & J

I used to have a friend that liked to describe herself at the time as PB & J. It stood for Pre-Baby and Joyful. At the time, I was definately pre-baby, but I wasn't joyful at all. I was organizing our photo cd's today and came across one that included pics from this particular time in our lives. When I saw these pictures, I remembered that there was joy when we were pre-baby and I wished I had recognized it then. Maybe this is what Paul means when he says he's "....learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." (Philippians 4:12)

Anyway, the story to these pictures is that we had been hearing a lot of noise in our attic. This would come to be the norm in our old house, but at the time, we were new to what sounded like bowling balls rolling back and forth the length of our attic. One night, we were awakened at 2 o'clock in the morning to a high pitched cry that sounded like a newborn in the hallway. Scooby (our dog) was sniffing and growling at the air conditioner closet. Jason carefully opened it up and saw a baby racoon trapped between the air conditioner and some spare filters. He got his leather gloves on, I hid behind the bedroom door (!) and with a small squirrel cage in hand, he lifted the racoon out of the closet and into the cage in a Spiderman-like maneuver. Before doing this, we had called animal control and realized that they weren't going to do anything until mid morning, so needing some sleep we took matters into our own hands. But that didn't seem so smart when we realized we didn't know what to do with him once we got him in the cage.

We finally decided to drive the scared and hissing little thing down to the creek nearby and let him go, hoping he would find another racoon family to join. We had to literally drop him out of the cage because he was so scared. Once out, he wouldn't move and when we started to drive off, we knew we just couldn't leave him out there all alone. Jason used his Spiderman skills again and put the racoon back in the cage and drove home. We decided to leave him in the cage on the front porch until we could arrange for a rescue team to come get him. I threw in a tortilla for him which met with more hissing.

When we woke up later, we checked to see how our little friend had faired through the night. We found the tortilla, not eaten, and the cage door bent back and empty. Apparently, the little guy's family had done some Spiderman moves of their own to rescue him. We never heard another peep out of the racoons while we lived there.