An afternoon in the woods

More pictures of the trip to Blacksburg will soon follow, but while I'm working on those I'll share a few shots from my afternoon in the woods last week. 

I'm still searching for the other half of the shed antlers from the huge buck.  While wandering, I visited our beaver pond, which is the new winter residence of four Canadian geese.  They weren't too happy to see me, but were fairly photogenic. 

In the same general area I found a few turtle shells.  One was just from a small box turtle, but the other was a fairly large snapping turtle.  I bet when he was alive, this was a 30-40 lb turtle.  Pretty impressive.

Finally I capped off my day by getting some shots of a bald eagle and a robin that looked sad and ignored.  Its gotta be tough to be a common bird.  No one gives you any love.

Hopefully I'm able to find that shed soon, but until then I'll certainly enjoy my walks in the woods. 

Teaser pics

This weekend we travelled back to Virginia Tech with Ejdo's sister, her husband, and their two girls.  All four adults went to VT and we are all in love with the place.  A longer post will follow about the fun weekend we had, but here are a few teaser pics to hold you over until I get things uploaded and edited. 

Discarded by nature

The park where my office is located is home to a number of deer, including a very large buck.  The glimpses we've caught of him indicated he's either a 10 or 12 pt, with a wide rack and a thick neck.  In laymans terms, a huge deer.

Yesterday one of my co-workers rushed up to me as I arrived at work.  He found half of the big buck's shed antlers, just laying on the side of the road.  Searching for sheds is a big deal among some outdoorsmen.  Some guys train their dogs to find sheds, some track and follow bucks for months to determine where their sheds might lay at the end of winter.  This massive shed was just laying on the side of the road.  It couldn't get much easier to find.

For size visualization purposes, the tallest tine on that half rack is probably a foot and a half long.  Its pretty huge.  The whole thing probably weighs 4 lbs.

Seeing this and hearing where the shed was found, I of course decided that a good portion of my day was going to be spent looking for the other half.  I thought I had a pretty good idea of the buck's range within the park and where he generally preferred to hang out, so off I went.

After around 3 hours of wandering through the woods, I returned basically empty handed.  I didn't find the other shed, but I did manage to find two red fox skulls.  Unfortunately both are missing their canines, but they're still a good addition to my skull collection. 

Last week I was at a different park and we found what appears to be a horse or donkey jaw in the woods.  Amazingly, both halves of the jaw were still connected and a lot of the teeth were intact.  Usually mice and other small woodland creatures chew on bones and teeth to take in calcium.  Pretty cool. 

Its always a nice day when you can just wander in the woods and find whatever nature leaves for you.

This morning as a horror flick

You know how sometimes you can step back and look at your life and realize that it would make a great movie?  This morning things were moving along nicely in the daily routine; bags were packed, Mila was in her jumperoo, car was warming up, coffee poured.  But that all came to a screeching halt with....The Attack of the Dumperoo!

Something about the bouncing and gravity that induces phenomenal poos while a kid is in the jumperoo.  Mila had one of those this morning.  So rather than hopping off to daycare 10 minutes early, we narrowly avoided a bath and got a wardrobe change. 

So beware parents everywhere....you never know when the Dumperoo will attack, but I guarantee it will be inconvenient.  And smelly. 

Catching up

In an effort to make the blog be "up to date", I'm going to post a series of pictures of my life to this general point. 

Ejdo and I got married in 2004.  It was a spectacular day and we are lucky to have so many great friends and family to celebrate with us.

We got our wonderful dog Sawyer in December of 2006.  He was probably around 8 months old when we got him, but acts like a puppy to this day. 

Then in July, Mila came to join us.  She was 19 inches long and 5lb 7 oz when she was born.  She has grown like a weed since then and looks like the nice chunky baby she should.  She is starting to eat solid foods and is fond of carrots, oatmeal, and parsnips.  Every day is an adventure but its so exciting.

So there's a quick rundown of things to this point.  Hopefully new postings will be a little more interesting in the future, but at least you get lots of a cute kid in this one!

New Beginnings

For quite a while I maintained a blog called HokieRider.  It was a collection of a wide variety of things I'm interested in.  From my dog, to sports, travel, family, work....it covered pretty much everything.  It also had no real direction.  Each post was a seperate entity and had no frame of reference to any other post. It was total stream of consciousness stuff.

I'm not saying this will be much different.  I'd like to be a little better about updating this blog with some sort of schedule, and I'd like it to make a little more sense.  But I'm not saying either of those will happen. 

All I know is I can't get into the HokieRider blog any longer and I want to share my life with my family who doesn't live here.  So here we are. 

My name is Lauryn.  I've been married to a wonderful man (who will be referred to as Ejdo) for 7 years.  We live in the Northern Virginia area just outside of DC.  In July I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Mila.  We also have a fantastic hound-pointer mix named Sawyer.  All in all we live a good life.

Ejdo's family is from the Czech Republic.  His mother came when she was in her 20's and his father's father came when he was in his 20's.  Ejdo and his sisters are 100% Czech, born in the US.  We participate in a Czech organization called Slavic- American Sokol. 

If you have seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then you will start to understand where my blog title comes from.  I live My Big Fat Czech life.  Many things that we do as a family are colored by the Czech paintbrush.  We joke about it often, but I'm finally going to write it down when it actually happens. 

So this blog will be about me, my family, my life, my job, my dog, my interests.  Maybe it will even be interesting for someone else to read.