Oh, Deer!

One of our favorite winter-evening things to do with the kids is watch the deer track through our backyard (Zoey calls them puppies). We had a group of two bucks and three does that would bed down in our backyard for a while. It has been fun keeping an eye on their activities. This is Jackson and Zoey watching our deer from the kitchen window. The picture is fuzzy because the room was dark.

Here is a picture of a deer family on the move during the last snowstorm. They had paused for a minute to dig up some grass from underneath the fresh snow to eat. Again, sorry about the fuzzy picture, but it was taken through a window in the dark...not the best for shooting a picture!

Last week we had a sad incident with a deer in our backyard. I was cleaning up after breakfast and saw a deer laying down in our backyard and I thought that it had frozen to death overnight. But then I noticed it was moving and realized it was stuck in our fence. As I went to go take a look at it, I realized it had only made it half way through our iron fence slats and had been trying all night to free itself. It was barely hanging on to life when I noticed it, and was in really bad shape. I called the police department, and within a couple of hours, we had quite the rescue team for the deer! A wildlife rescue van with trailer, two cop cars, a firetruck and an ambulance! Jackson thought it was great. I won't share the rest of the details because the deer didn't survive and we were sad about that, but I was thinking the public safety workers must have had nothing better to do on a Monday morning than this to have so many vehicles for this one deer!

Harsh Winter

It's winter already and our kids are feeling it! Both Jackson and Zoey had a bad case of croup a few weeks ago. Zoey was especially hit hard with it. She lost her voice and had extremely labored breathing, we worried if she was getting enough air at all! This is a picture of her sleeping during on of her nebulizer treatments we were medicating her with to help let the muscles relax in her airways. Although she looks so cute, she felt miserable!

Then, just days after getting well, Zoey started running a fever. She wouldn't eat, and wanted nothing more to do than be held and sleep. She would shake constantly, and I felt so bad for her! We finally got her on an antibiotic and she seems to be a whole new girl! Although we're not positive what she had....a secondary infection or a urinary tract infection, but the antibiotic seems to be doing its job. Thank goodness for medicine.

Sleep has been rough around here the last few weeks, but we are now on the mend and doing better!

Ice Castles

A fun story was highlighted in our local news of a guy who was building ice castles at the Zermont resort in Midway. We decided to take a Sunday afternoon and take a look. It was sooo cool (no pun intended)!

There are about a dozen different castles, about 20-30 feet tall. It was fun to see all teh different ice formations. The guy who is making these castles, works on them about 14 hours a day, cultivating around 500-1000 icilcles a day to help build and guide his icicle formations. The castles increase at about 10-12 tons per day, amazing!

They say these will remain until March...so go take a look if you have time, it's a fun outing!

Sledding

A couple of weeks ago we took the kids sledding up South Fork. It was a lot of fun, and the kids enjoyed it too...for about 45 minutes.

I bundled them up really good, but with the highs only in the twenties, they wouldn't stay warm for long. I think they were happy and having fun, enjoying it all, until they realized they couldn't feel their hands and feet. The 'cold' sensation was totally skipped....they went from being toasty warm to freezing! We hurried home and had some hot cocoa and pizza and played with the cousins until way past bedtime! It was fun.