Every afternoon, the boys have a Quiet Time. It's generally 60-90 minutes of them quietly playing in their room, while I take a break from the noise and chaos by napping or paying bills. We're working on the habit of not coming out unless it's an emergency. If they come out, it's an additional 10 minute penalty. My 7 yo does well with this, my 5 yo not-so-much.
Today, I was catching up on some emails at the computer, when they both came thundering down the hallway panicked and near tears, before their time was up. I was annoyed with the interruption - will I ever learn to overcome this? - and I have no doubt my face expressed my displeasure.
JK: MOM! You're never gonna believe this!
B: Dere is a huge 'piduh (spider) in our bedwoom.
JK: It's huge Mom. I thought Evan was faking, but he wasn't. It's huge! *holds fingers up to show me it's about 2 inches in diameter.
Me: *huffing impatience and getting out of my chair* Show me.
If this was a silverfish or a cricket, I was gonna be pretty stinkin' mad. Both boys lead the way down the hall and excitedly point me to the basket the spider was on. Their room was in such disarray that I actually had to move a few things just to get a view of it.
Me: *BIG FAT GASP!!!* Holy crap!
B: I tol' you Momma. It's huge.
Yes. Yes it was.
Now. I'm arachnophobic. Have been since I was a child. As in heart rate and blood-pressure sky-rocket and I have to work very hard to not hyperventilate or empty my bladder. And this one was the biggest I'd ever seen not in captivity. In my babies' room. Which was full of scattered toys and chaos. If he decided to bolt, there were literally hundreds of places for him to hide where I'd have to be up close and personal to find him. I considered the shotgun. Maybe overkill?
I asked one of the boys to go get one of N's shoes by the front door - I was gonna "beat the fool" out of it as one of my friends would later say. They brought a flip-flop. Too flimsy. I asked them to go get an empty pickle jar under the sink, thinking I could capture it. They brought it and I realized in order to cover the spider with a jar, meant my hand had to be within a few inches of that monster and that just wasn't going to happen. So I stood and hyperventilated for a few minutes, literally praying that the Lord bless my hands and protect me if I just somehow removed it and didn't kill it. I asked the boys to go back to the kitchen and get the grill tongs and a paper bag. When they got them, I used the tongs to very gently pick up the basket Mr. Charlotte was sitting on and dumped all of it in the big paper bag. Which was then grasped by the tongs and removed from the house and unceremoniously dumped onto our neighbor's cleared driveway. (Nobody lives there...he's doing construction on it.)
We all breathed a sigh of relief. And I struggled with a panic attack for the next two hours, even though we were perfectly safe.
I'm completely frustrated with how tiny this picture makes him look. He was not.
After we released him, I very carefully scooched a quarter towards him so we could see how big he was in proper scale. See? He's big!
What made me most proud and made the event seem not so terrible? After we went back into the house, we had this conversation:
JK: Mom, we have GOT to put that into our Nature Journal!
JK: Mom, we have GOT to put that into our Nature Journal!
Yay for Charlotte Mason! Homeschool Win!
Me: You go right ahead baby. I'm having a glass of wine!
(I am accrediting the Lord's strength and our recent completion of E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web" for saving this arachnid's life. I hope that big furball is thanking his lucky stars! Because if it weren't for those two things and he HAD run away hiding someplace in the bedroom, we'd be at a hotel tonight while the house was fumigated. Not kidding.)
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