I woke up Saturday morning expecting to take Daughter #2 to her weekly swimming lesson and then to go for lunch with some friends. Daughter #1 was still sick, but her fever had broken. We rescheduled our family plans until she was 100% better. A regular Saturday and quiet weekend…until I opened my front door.

What happened, you ask?

Destruction.

My beautiful pumpkins. The largest one decimated. The mini ones stolen.

This is what it looked like before:

And to make matters worse, the culprits–I am assuming they are the raccoons that like to prowl our neighbourhood–left every other pumpkin on the street intact.

Except for mine.

This isn’t the first time we had been hit by these terrible creatures. When we first moved into this new neighbourhood, we hadn’t closed the garage door properly.

Yo, it was not pretty.

The raccoons attacked the garbage and left it all over my driveway. They got our neighbour this past garbage day.

I know, I know, some of you are saying, “but why did you leave the pumpkins out like that? What did you think was going to happen?”

I know, but we had left our pumpkins out last year for a good two weeks and nothing happened to them. I don’t know if it’s the unseasonably warm weather we’re having this fall or if things are really bad for raccoons and they are attacking pumpkins. I don’t know and I don’t care, I am just annoyed that my front porch was covered in pumpkin guts and seeds this morning.

I found the mini pumpkins, tossed carelessly, in the side yard. I guess the beasts thought that if they couldn’t eat them, they might as well get rid of them.

The sole survivor of the massacre is safely inside the house. I will be carving it later this week. Hopefully, it will make it to Halloween.

Chupse.

Washing pumpkin guts off my porch after a lovely lunch was not the way I intended to end my Saturday afternoon.