Saturday was e-baby's christening. We did it during mass, and this church does things a little differently than other Catholic churches I grew up in. They do a full immersion in warm water, and there's a tradition of having all the children in church come forward and make a cross on the baby's forehead (some do this with a thumb, some with a forefinger, some with a whole open hand, and some with a booger). E-baby was the picture of poise and grace. Afterwards we had everybody back at the house for dinner and king cake. A good time was had by all. Here are some pictures.

You know from the title of my page that we live in the woods, and that we have the biggest deer on Earth here, so it may come as no surprise to you that, after 3 years living here, we finally hit one. A buck no less, well I guess you could say less, by about 1/2 a rack of antlers. We are pretty sure he survived but all of the other reindeer are gonna laugh and call him names (like Lopsy or 5-point).

I am making jokes but in reality it was pretty frightening. We were on the way home from the church with SNG driving, Dianaverse riding shotgun, e-baby and me in the back, SNG's parents following in their truck, everyone else already at the house. We were going along at about 30mph. Probably 1/2 millisecond before impact, I saw a beige figure approaching the car from the side and wondered why there was a jogger out so late and them WHAM!! It leaped right into the front-passenger-side of the car. SNG's parents saw a doe as well, so all I can figure is he was chasing her through the field right there, and then over the fence and into the Forrester. Oh, yes, it was the new car. It needs body work, but everyone was fine.



For as long as we've lived here I've been concerned about hitting a deer. Now that we've done it, I'm not very upset about the car because everyone was fine. No, listen. This is huge. We were slammed from the side by a love-crazed buck in mating season, and everyone was fine. I'm not saying that I'm going to start hitting deer for fun or driving fast in the woods, but that was such an enormous relief that I'm less afraid of it now.