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"You know you&amp;#039;re going to have a long day when you start it by Googling &amp;quot;lasagna,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;raccoon droppings&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hardwood floors.&amp;quot; Then again, everyday has been a long day since we started renovating our house. But I didn&amp;#039;t foresee uninvited, furry dinner guests getting INSIDE the house while we were sleeping. I guess I should be happy we slept through it in the first place. &amp;quot;Mom! Somebody spilled something down here!&amp;quot; my eight-year-old yelled from the edge of the dining room while I was in the bathroom upstairs.  I imagined that one of the not-quite-empty water bottles we had discarded into a cardboard box we use as a temporary recycling bin had tipped over during the night. So I told him, &amp;quot;Just get a paper towel and clean it up.&amp;quot; He didn&amp;#039;t move.  &amp;quot;Um. You gotta look at this, Mom,&amp;quot; he replied, backing up slowly from the dining room as though I&amp;#039;d just asked him to run a Hazmat clean-up in Times Square at rush hour.  I put down my mascara, readied myself for a lecture on &amp;quot;why we all need to help out around here,&amp;quot; and skipped downstairs. That&amp;#039;s when I realized a few paper towels weren&amp;#039;t going to cut it with this mess. There, INSIDE my house, were the remains of a raccoon party\u2026oh no!\u2026on my hardwood floors, the only thing left in this house worth, well, not having animal poop dumped on it. Somehow, what I highly suspect were raccoons had found their way into our house through one of the many holes the contractors have inflicted on it, chowed down on leftover lasagna in the garbage can we&amp;#039;d left in the dining room-cum-kitchen, pulled a bag of chocolate candies into our gutted kitchen for dessert and, as a parting gift, spread Major League Baseball-brand peanuts rather thoroughly by the door. &amp;quot;Well, at least they&amp;#039;re Yankee fans, too,&amp;quot; my son said, surveying the peanut damage before scampering away from the mess \u2013 and the clean-up. Thankfully, our hardwood floors survived the big bash with little intervention. The contractors even cleaned up the chocolate and peanuts before boarding up the raccoon-sized holes in our house with wood and nails. But I&amp;#039;m sure the animals will be back, and they&amp;#039;ll bring friends. Who knows what I&amp;#039;ll be Googling tomorrow morning. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a2050/good-grief-blog-080807/?src=shelter_footer>