Texas Cliche

Ever been to Texas? What's the first animal you associate with my home state? Umm, besides the longhorn--something much smaller. 








Mountain lion? 
Rattlesnake? 
Scorpion? 
Although all 3 of these lovely animals can be found where I live in Central Texas, the critter I'm thinking of is pretty much harmless.

Anybody guess this little guy?

Even though I've lived in Texas my entire life, the only armadillos I ever saw growing up were on the side of the road.  

UPSIDE.   DOWN.            NOT.   MOVING.  

You know, like this:

The picture of the dead armadillo I almost used was just too much;

I decided to rotate the pic and let you use your imagination!

We call them Texas speed bumps. So I find it extremely weird that I've recently had 2 encounters with armadillos in my back yard! 
The first one happened about a month ago when I went outside to bring my dogs in from their pen. Every night I do this without incident, but this time I walked through the gate and almost stepped on a DEAD armadillo! On his back, claws up and everything! To make matters worse, just a couple feet away was another one! I'm not gonna lie, I let out a little scream. And then I looked at my dogs and they just smiled, like this:

Samson

Butterball

Fast forward to incident #2: Yesterday morning I was putting the dogs back outside for the day. We have a routine--on my command they go into the pen and then I follow with their food. They've been trained to wait until I give them the sign to eat. Can you tell that we are big "Dog Whisperer" fans at my house?


Anyway, they go inside the pen and start running around sniffing and acting all crazy until Butterball darts out with an armadillo in her mouth. And then I forget everything I've learned from Cesar Milan about being calm and start running around yelling for them to drop it and come back inside the pen to eat. And then they DO come in the pen and drop the very much alive armadillo right by my feet! Ewww--I continue screaming and running around and believe it or not, this worked because the armadillo shuffled right out of the pen! Hopefully he is smart enough to stay away from the crazy screaming lady and her dogs next time.


All in all, it was a very exciting start to the last day of school for me! The rest of the day was spent scanning books for my yearly library inventory, which is the exact opposite of exciting. One good thing about doing inventory is that I am reminded of all the fabulous books in the library, so I'd like to leave you with a great read-aloud recommendation:

"Armadilly Chili" (by one of my favorite children's authors, Helen Ketteman) is a Texas-style adaptation of "The Little Red Hen".  Go out and get yourself a copy if you don't already have one! And if you ever want to see a real, live armadillo, stop by my back yard. Sam and Butterball would be happy to find one for you!
~Swersty