Oh, deer!

I really should update this blog more than once a month!!
 
We are adjusting to living in the South. I've started to get frustrated with not having any friends here or anything to do, so a couple weeks ago I made an effort to reach out. I'm not really much of a social butterfly so my attempt at making friends was adding women from church as my friends on facebook. :) It actually helps me get a feel for their personality and maybe some things we have in common. I also added a lot of Joe's family as facebook friends, since I really don't know many of them (and since we now live in their territory) it couldn't hurt, right?? Along with being a stalker, I have also made it a point to actually talk to the women in my ward. I actually found myself looking forward to going to church.

We also discovered the local library. Every week they have a family storytime where they read a book to the kids and then we do a craft based on what the book was about. It's really fun and we checkout a huge bag of books and movies each week. Our first week, we learned about scarecrows and made scarecrow hats. This past week we learned about Thanksgiving and make paper turkeys.

A few weeks ago, we had a pretty interesting story unfold in our front yard. Joe walked in the door from work, one night, and said that he almost hit a deer in our driveway. Whaa? Yeah, so 45min or so later we head out to go to the store and as we are walking out the door I tell Anderson to keep a lookout for deer (trying to be silly) and we step outside and there's a deer in our front yard and it runs across the street into the neighbors yard. Again, whaa? So, as we are driving out of our driveway we glance at the edge of our lawn and there's a deer lying in the ditch and the deer Anderson and I just spotted is still in the neighbors yard. Joe and I try not to bring attention to the dead deer for the sake of the kids. We continue on our way to the store, a little shocked as to what we just saw. We return home about 15-20min later and sure enough the deer is still there . . . in our yard . . . dead. We did what any normal person would do, we called my brother-in-law, the deer hunter. We asked him if he wanted the meat. So, he drove to our house and the guys went out and did their manly-men thing and cut up the deer . . . Shudder. Before they did that though, I called Fish and Game to ask what the rules were and to make sure we didn't break any laws. I told the woman on the phone about the deer in my yard and she asked me quite possibly the strangest question, "would you like to make use of the meat?" I laughed. I told her about my brother-in-law wanting to come and get it and, I chuckled some more. I apologized and said that I had never done this kind of thing before. She didn't seem too amused, but told me that all I needed to do was report the kind of deer (gender, size, etc.) and we'd be okay to 'make use' of the meat (which, by the way, is what they prefer you to do with the deer's carcass). . . Again, shudder. I sent my brother-in-law home with ALL of the deer meat, not even remotely tempted to keep any, but not before we broke the news to the boys about the dead deer and then took pictures next to it. I had to document this crazy event.
The best part of it all had to be that earlier that day, out of the blue, Anderson had requested to watch Bambi (for the first time in forever) and so we watched it, not knowing what "nature" had in store for us later that evening.
After all the excitement was over, Joe and I couldn't help but laugh. We feel like we officially live in Arkansas.

The following pictures are way out of order but I'm posting this from my tablet and can't figure out how to fix it. I also threw in some pics of the beautiful Tater Cheeks, for fun!