Pesky Raccoons

For those of you who have gone camping before, I am sure you are aware that raccoons can be pesky visitors to the campsite.  Well...our family took a camping trip to a national park recently, and we had a raccoon visit us, but not in the way most would expect.  Somehow while we were sound asleep, the raccoon managed to open our tent (there are little pinpricks from the raccoon's claw...apparently he held onto the tent while using his nose or something to push right through), climb inside and over one of the clothing bags, grab our backpack (used as a diaper bag), and pull it outside.  He accomplished all of that without waking a single person, and amazingly, he would have had to crawl right next to me!  There was a can of formula spilled all over the outside of our tent, but fortunately, we had brought an extra one with us.  The backpack was right next to the tent.  I am grateful I didn't wake up to see a raccoon in the tent because I would have totally freaked out and scared the creature half to death, and that might have caused larger issues, but it makes me nervous that it could just enter so stealthily.

Before anyone starts to explain that we are not supposed to have food in our tent, I just want to say in the past when James was a baby, we had his formula in our tent as well without ever an issue...even staying at the exact same national park.  Also soy formula smells awful!

We determined after talking to some of our camping neighbors that these raccoons are extremely smart.  They tried to get into a few tents nearby as well, but the people were able to hear the raccoon and scare him away.  Since it is such a populated camping area, we think the raccoons have taught themselves how to enter and find something to pull out of the tent.  We don't think they actually smelled any food in our tent...once again the formula was the only thing in there...we didn't want our neighbors to hear a screaming baby for a long period of time if he happened to awake during the night and needed a bottle to calm down.