Sam and I have recently modified our weekly Saturday ritual to include the swim class that Geralyn signed us up for. Well, she really just signed up Samantha. I just sit there with the other parents and hope nobody drowns. Or, if someone absolutely HAS to drown, that it’s that kid with the huge forehead and Power Rangers swim trunks who totally just shoved Sam out of the way. Watching these swim lessons has brought to light one thing about my eldest daughter, though: she still has a lot to learn about operating in structured environments.
Sam is as friendly and outgoing a kid as I’ve ever seen, but a few minutes in to the first lesson I was having flashbacks to my own childhood, where my grade school teachers would routinely tear at their hair when I traipsed off in my own la-la land, even if that meant standing up and walking across the classroom –between the teacher and the rest of the class, even– to inspect the hamster cage in the middle of a lesson while everyone sat still at their desks and gaped at me. In short, Sam displayed an amazing ability to completely not pay attention to what the teacher was saying and instead jabbered at the alarmed little girl next to her, else she delighted to flailing and splashing in the water around her. I would have been more concerned if the water were more than a foot deep and the poolside weren’t lined with a platoon of lifeguards perched on the balls of their feet. So I was just bemused and Sam was thoroughly happy.
Later that afternoon, though, we got a special treat. I was just getting ready to get Sam dressed to go out to dinner when the doorbell rang. Since it seems like the only people who ring our doorbell are entrepreneurial neighbor kids who want to sell me candy bars so their school band can go to Tunisia or something, I have been asked by the rest of the household (read: Geralyn) not to answer the door because apparently telling these little swindlers to take a hike reflects badly upon us as neighbors. As a result, we have a lot of candy bars sitting around if you ever want any.
This time, though, Geralyn called me down a moment after answering the dor, saying that I needed to see this. There were indeed kids on our front porch. And our sidewalk. And our yard. There was a veritable gang of children before me and my first thought was that I was going to have to buy a hell of a lot of chocolate bars with almonds.
“Dude,” said the nearest tyke, who for some reason was holding a loaded squirt gun, “you got a dead deer in your flower bed.”
This was, I admit, one of the last things I expected to hear. But I only had to glance over to the right of the front porch. There, with its neck unnaturally bent so that the top of its nose was touching the top of its back, was a very dead deer.
Samantha tried to dive past us to see, but with some frenzied footwork and door slamming, we were able to keep her from seeing it. I looked again, and the contorted deer had not gotten up, shook it off, and bounded off. On the plus side, this had made us wildly popular with the neighborhood kids. It seemed like there were 20 or more youths standing in my yard, all staring slack-jawed at the fluffy-tailed corpse in my flower bed. I hoped it would be enough to get me out of a few future fundraisers.
The down side, of course, was that there was a carcass in my yard. Geralyn started frantically calling places trying to get someone to cart it off, and when the first place wanted to charge us $300 I offered to roll the deer up in a tarp, dump it in the trunk, pop in The Soppranos soundtrack, and drive it to some ditch off a back country road. THIS WAS NEARLY THE PLAN THAT WON OUT. Animal Control told us that one of their “Carcass Removal Technicians” (I almost called them out just to get one of their business cards) could dispose of it, but not if it were on private property. So, they said, if the carcass could “somehow find itself out to the middle of the road…” I had brief vision of my grabbing ahold of one hind leg and dragging the diseased corpse to the middle of the street with one hand while cheerfully waving to our gaping neighbors with the other, but even I knew that this might prove a wee bit too unpopular amongst the townfolk.
In the end we found that, ironically, the State Department of Conservation said they would come and remove it for free. As of the time of this writing, they haven’t actually shown up, but we’ve managed to distract Samantha by letting her letting her make mashed potatoes.
Finally, let I forget to mention her this week, Mandy was also spared the spectacle of seeing the deer succumb to its natural predator the suburban soccer mom in a SUV. She seems relieved, though she also seems to be practicing how to run into things in her little car walker thingie. She also had a 1-year checkup at the doctor’s recently, and we were surprised to find out that she’s at the 50th percentile for both weight and height, which suggests that she has grown into her weight a bit.
Unwilling to leave us with a sense of normalcy, though, the doctor just had to throw in that she’s only at the 48th percentile for skull circumference. This fact doesn’t worry me so much as it just sits on my mind, never leaving me be to neither forget about it or obsess over it. So I’ve put Mandy on some skull stretching exercises, which Sam is happy to help out with.
Oh ick on the deer! When we lived in New York, our neighbor had an iron fence around his pool with spikes on the top. A deer tried to jump the fence and did not make it. Yes, he ended up on the top of the spike but it did not do him in. The sherif was dispatched to put the poor thing out of his misery. This being upstate New York, the neighbor called some of the more “country” folk who lived up the hill to come and get some meat for the freezer. Ahhh, nothing like living in the sticks!
Yeah, I briefly just considered putting a “Free Deer!” sign on it to see what would happen, but I think we live just a few miles too far in for that to work.