Kenny's 9th B-Day

Look, there was a little boy under all that dirt!! Just figured I'd post a rare picture of Stephen without his face in a scowl or his tongue sticking out... We've had a busy couple weeks. Hope's parents came down for Thanksgiving, so we had a big turkey dinner that day, with all the fixings (wonderfully prepared by Hope). The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Kenny, Rich Pruden, and I went canoeing on the Saline River:

We have been very dry this year, so the river is considerably lower than usual. Below, a bunch of mussel shells, presumably opened and eaten by otters or raccoons, litter one of the gravel bars:

As you probably know, we love to stop on these gravel bars to search for bits of petrified wood. We found a large quantity in the short canoe trip we took this day. Below, Rich and Kenny show by their wet pant legs their dedication to the search for petrified wood:

After the canoe trip, Hope's parents had to drive back to Michigan so Rich would be rested up before his work week started on Monday. I took advantage of the rest of the afternoon to go deer hunting. I managed to shoot a button buck that evening, but unfortunately, it was gut-shot and I didn't find it until the next morning. Given that a fair amount of the meat was tainted, I donated the carcass to one of the Arkansas Archeological Survey's station archeologist, Dr. Julie Morrow. Julie wanted a deer to skin and carve up using a replica prehistoric knife so she can look at how the use left wear marks on the chipped stone. She will also get the tissues off of the bones and prep the bones for long-term storage, and will eventually use them in a comparative anatomy collection. This collection allows people with partial animal bone remains to compare with specimens of a known background, and can also be used as a teaching tool. I was happy to donate this deer because I was confident of getting more opportunities to get venison (more on this later).

The big event this weekend was Kenny's 9th birthday party. He actually turned 9 on Tuesday, but we waited until Friday night to have his friends over. They played a lot of games, yelled a lot, and did the ever-popular cupcake decorating:

Even Stephen got into the act:

Note the absence of Beth in these pictures--our lil' social butterfly was playing over at a friend's house down the street during this boy-time. Most of the boys went home at 8 p.m., but Kenny's friend Beau stayed overnight. This morning (Saturday) I dragged myself out of bed to go hunting again. I've been out more this year than last, and had been seeing deer just about every time I went out, just not a lot of bigger deer. After sitting on stand for 1.5 hours this morning and passing up the only (small) deer I saw, I was walking back to my truck when I noticed a larger deer feeding on acorns in the woods along the trail. It was far enough back where it hadn't seen me, so I steadied my aim and downed the decent-sized doe (this one didn't run off). We've got the deer at the butcher's now (we're getting lazy in our old age, letting someone else process the deer), and we'll have venison in the freezer shortly. While we were dealing with the deer, Beth was off again, this time to a Daisy Scout cupcake decorating event:

As you can see, she has quite a talent for decorating cupcakes! If I get a chance, I'll try to make one more blog posting before we head out for the Christmas break...