A scary thing

happened to me last night, looking back it's not scary, but at the time my heart was racing! We live 5-10 miles outside of town, we have neighbors, but they aren't super close, and there is a fence between us and them, and woods behind our house. In front of our house is the road that follows down our little cul-de-sac. All in all we live in a pretty quiet area. At about 4 this morning I was abruptly woken by a howling dog, somewhere in the area. When I awoke, it took me a second to figure out why I had woken. I looked at the clock and then heard the howling again. Then I heard footsteps, which I thought were in our house. I looked over at Rob and he looked back, and said "I heard it too". Okay, so it wasn't my imagination, as it usually is. Rob walked quietly out of our room, checked on both kids, and then went into the bathroom, the next closest room. Nothing. He then went into the family area where I could just barely see him from our room and he stopped in front of the window. My heart was racing at this point. He came back slowly and quietly and told me there was a family of deer eating our shrubs. Oh my goodness! I was relieved, but my adrenaline was pumped. We knew the deer had been eating our shrubs, we never actually caught them, but we knew because my shrubs look anorexic now. What were once full, green and hardy are now dull and bare. It's okay though, because I have special place in my heart for nature. They had to really be hungry to be venturing into our front yard for food. It was a whole family of them, or appeared to be, two babies and two adults. This is the first winter in the 4 years that we've lived here that any animal has tried to eat our shrubs, or anything in our yard for that matter. The footsteps were of the deer walking through our snow that has a frozen layer on top from recent rain.
The evidence:

I can hope that they will fill in this spring, and for now it just adds to the ambience of our tilted mailbox that was hit a few months back by one of our neighbors who spun out of control on our 10 mph icy road and took it right out of the ground. The ground is too frozen to put it back in....sigh.....