Deer Hunting

While most of you were eating a wonderful lunch and exchanging stories at the anthology party, I was deer hunting. I'm not sure you will remember, but that Saturday was wet and rainy. The children and I were still in our pajamas, drawing at the dinning room table when I received the call from Donna. It was 12:06 when she called to encourage me to attend the anthology party in Naylor. I had given up on going because I didn't realize you could take children and Alan, who is retired and usually is home all the time, had to work that Saturday administering the SAT.

After I hung up the phone, I told the children we were going on an adventure. We all scurried to get dressed and were out the door in 3o minutes. That's when the trouble began.

Getting in the car, should be a simple task. For some reason, that morning it wasn't. Right as we got to the car, Andy started screaming that he wanted "Fluflee." For those of you who don't have 5 year olds, Fluflee is that part of childhood young children often refuse to part with--the security blanket. Fluflee is a ragged blue/pink dog that has been at Andy's side since babydom.
Usually, Andy is just content to sleep with Fluflee, but for some reason this morning, Andy simply refused to go any farther without his dog. That's when I should have given up, but of course, I didn't.

After an extensive 15 minute search, we found Fluflee. We went back to the car when Allie suddenly started screaming that she was hungary. While I was trying to reason with her, Andy decided to slam his hand in the door. Now that wasn't an easy task, since we have atomatic doors, but somehow he managed.

Since there was no blood, just tears, I decided to forge on--like the pioneer Mom I'm really not. So, off we went to the bakery. I knew I'd be a little late, but I could still see everyone. Right as we turned in the bakery, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but my daugher and son-in-law. They went into the bakery with us and I selected a cheesecake with fresh strawberries on top, while everyone else selected cookies in protest of the injustice of not getting cheesecake.

Anna said she'd be glad to watch the kids while I went to the party. I thought my luck was chanaging. So, I gleefully gave her custody of the kids for the day and began on my merry way when my cell phone started ringing. It was a friend of mine who wanted to meet with me about some ideas she had combinging her art and my writing. We decided that it would be fun if she went along, so I did a quick detour to her house, only to encounter the longest train in the history of the world.

Of course, we were now very late, so we thought we'd make up time on the backroad. As we slammed dead center into the deer, going 60 mph, I thought, "This was a dumb idea." The deer died, my car died, but the cheesecake survived. It was sitting on the bakeseat and it never even budged! It was a good thing, too because it gave us something to do while waiting on the wrecker, which broke down on the way to get us. So, while you were at the anthology party, I was somewhere between Waycross and Lake City hunting my first deer.