Oh, Deer!

I do not love days like I had today. Nothing terrible happened but nothing fun did, either. The day went from nauseating to annoying to aggravating. It was just your average, sucky day.

Beginning the day with a doctor's appointment is never a positive omen, so I can't say I was expecting laughter and merriment, but neither was I anticipating blood and death. Luckily the gore was only of the deer-hit-by-car variety (unlucky for the deer, however), but it was still nasty. Living in Westchester, we certainly see a lot of deer around (I hit one with my car a few short weeks after moving here from the city--talk about a rude suburban awakening!) but what we don't see a lot of are guns.

The deer looked just like this one--
except it was lying by the road
with blood pouring out of its head.

So, when, at 8:30 this morning, some civilian standing in the road put his hand up to stop traffic and I watched as a State Trooper marched across the street with what looked like a rifle in his hands (but was actually a shotgun according to my cop friend Pete--who knew those suckers were so big?), I was transfixed. Mesmerized even. Then BANG! That's when I saw the deer lying by the side of the road up.

"Oh, God" I moaned.

"What is it?" inquired my son from the back seat. "What was that noise?"

Then another shot. Agghhh! Did the cop not kill the deer with the first one? Travesty!

"What was that loud noise? asked my son again.

By now we were being waved through. I didn't respond until we'd passed the deer (a pool of blood around its head), because I didn't want my son to look out his window and see the carnage. Luckily, his attention was diverted by the police car on the other side of the street.

It wasn't until we were pulling into the doctor's parking lot a minute later that I told him what had happened. He had a lot of questions: Why did they have to kill the deer? Why didn't they take it to the vet to be fixed? Why did they have to shoot it twice?

The rest of the day was...eh. My daughter's doctor's appointment went fine. No shots, which was awesome--last thing I wanted was to see more blood--but I was disappointed that the doctor couldn't give me any suggestions about how to get my daughter to stop biting her nails down so low that they sometimes bled.

"Every kid has their own particular bad habit," she reassured me. Gee, thanks.

Then we stopped by DD for doughnuts (Tuesday is our official Doughnut Day).

"That's something nice that happened to you today!" is what you are probably saying to yourself right now. Well, it would be if I actually allowed myself to eat a doughnut. But no, I just get a strawberry frosted with sprinkles for the girl and maple frosted with sprinkles for the boy. It's bikini season, after all.

After my daughter's Tiny Ballerinas class, we returned home, where my kids proceeded to try my patience, as per usual. My daughter wouldn't take her (much needed) nap, and then my son had a massive meltdown all because I was about to beat him at Chutes and Ladders (he's five--finally old enough to lose now and then). It was extra-annoying because five minutes earlier he'd beaten me fair and square at Candy Land.

"You can't win every time, you know!"

And, hey, losing at Chutes and Ladders isn't such a bad way to learn this lesson. The deer? She had to learn the hard way.