During one of Liam's classes this morning I sat and talked with another homeschool mom friend of mine while we all waited for our kids. She was having a garage sale and noticed a couple of brown recluse spiders milling about after she'd moved some things out of her basement. She'd hired a man to spray her house today, but didn't make the call until after she caught a spider in a jar and made a family trip to the zoo where the staff identified it, kept it, and named it after one of her kids.
"You caught a brown recluse," I said more as a statement, not a question.
"Yeah. In a jar. I came home from riding my bike and saw in
on the ground and my first thought was to dash off and get a jar. They were
really nice at the zoo. Did you know that not all people react to brown recluse
bites? Sometimes the flesh rots off by the bite, but only sometimes. Other
times it's just a red bump. Fascinating."
She turned to look at me but at some point during the conversation (either the part where she caught the spider or the flesh-rotting part) I had frozen.
Her first thought was to catch it in a jar.
I was in awe of her courage. My first thought would have been somewhere along the line of OMGWTFSPIDERSPIDERSPIDER!!!!!!! There would have been screaming. I've been known to run into walls and furniture in an attempt to run through them while escaping from a spider. I've written before that I am terrified of tiny things with lots of attitude and this includes spiders and my children. I would not have gotten close enough to it to catch it in a jar because with my luck, it would have jumped on my face and sucked my brain out through my eyes.
It reminded me of when I spotted one of those trilobites running across the floor the other day. The boys tried to catch it while I dry-heaved in a corner. I called Chris immediately.
"Um, you need to stop home during lunch because I just saw some seriously prehistoric craziness run across the floor."
"What'd it look like?"
"A mili or centipede. But with long antennae."
"Then that's what it was. We have cardboard boxes in the basement. They actually like to eat those."
"I know what they are and they're weird. I'd try to kill it but it would probably jump into my ear and burrow through my brain."
I heard a sigh on other end of the line.
I listened to my friend detail how the spider incident
became a homeschool lesson for her kids and how they got to go behind the
scenes at the zoo when they added the family's spider to their insect house.
They learned about different varieties of the things, habitats, and other educational
grossness. Her kids were learning without even realizing it. By the time the
kids' class was over I knew more than I ever wanted to about arachnids.
Semi-related: the boys made shadow monsters yesterday, an idea I got from one of my favorite websites, a children's craft blog. I even used an X-acto knife and didn't cut my fingers off.
Those creepy things are house centipedes. They are disgusting and evil and will crawl across your face at night.
Aaaargh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh thank goodness, I'm not the only one that is totally freaked out by those crazy looking things. I have a reoccurring nightmare where I walk into my home and there are bugs all over my entire home. Well, one day, I woke up too this nightmare and it scared me to pieces. I went all whoop-ass can on the creatures. I had to put one in a bag too show the exterminator that morning. He was all like "um yeah the only way your getting rid of these is if you cut back your trees." It was a living nightmare that I hope I don't ever have to live again.
I'm totally with you -- if I see any type of insect creature I automatically think to squish it. Actually, I automatically call my husband to squish it for me.
My mother-in-law is like your friend though -- she likes to catch the bugs that are inside and put them outside. Screw that. One day I was at her house, on the back porch and she was like, "Oh we discovered that that plant over there has a wolf spider nest, how neat!" I about jumped out of my skin. If that had been me, that spiders nest would have been gone as soon as I could get my mitts on a can of Raid.
BTW -- I caught you on Allman yesterday morning and I'm definitely going to try the Jack in the Box tacos with ranch dressing. I'm almost 6 months pregnant and those tacos are like crack for me. I swear those suckers must be made with like horse meat, but I don't care. Next time the hubby brings them home, I'm dipping them in ranch. Thanks for the tip!
I used to have arachnophobia. Not anymore. I'm the freakin' Steve Irwin of household pests. My capture / kill resume includes mice, a bat, water bugs, a snake, house centipedes (those things that don't actually eat cardboard - they eat SPIDERS!), brown recluse spiders, wolf spiders, giant I don't know what spider that made me say, "HOLY MONKEYS", a bird, random lizard I almost squashed with my head, et. al.
I know my enemy :)
I'm glad someone else has the same insane incredulous reaction to people catching spiders in jars. Growing up, my family had a catch and release policy and if I saw anything in the house I would shriek and yell, "YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS BEFORE I THROW MY SHOE AT ________!"
Cute monsters! Is that okay to say?
I'm cracking up because just yesterday I had to get all Rambo and kill a freakishly large spider in the basement. I briefly considered just sequestering myself and the kids upstairs and letting him take over the lower half of our house, but images of him growing and growing and one day busting through the door and gleefully devouring us all quickly filled my head, so I took a deep breath, put on my largest pair of pointy-toed boots and bravely faced the eight-legged beast. I'm pretty sure I've now passed this terrible neurosis on the my children because I hopped around and screamed like the pansy that I am until I finally managed to catch it under my toe and grind it deep into the floor for good measure. I then left it there, because I wouldn't dare try to pick it up as it may raise from the dead just to exact painful revenge.
Did I mention that I too do not like spiders?
I absolutely HATE spiders and snakes, and any other creepy crawlies! True story: I once found a bat in my room. Yes, a bat. When I was in about 3rd grade, I opened my curtains to see what kind of day it was outside. As I did, something black swooped down by my head and flew under my bed. I FREAKED out. I ran downstairs to tell my mother and she, of course, didn't believe me. She probably didn't think I really knew what a bat looked like. Well, she followed me upstairs, looked under my bed and sure enough..laying on top of a suitcase under my bed, was a bat..a real live bat. She too flipped out and ran downstairs to call my dad. He came home and somehow got the bat. I can't remember what he did with it..but I never wanted to use that suitcase again..bat germs. :)
I hate hate hate spiders. But if my husband is not home, I grit my teeth and destroy them (all the while explaining to my children that spiders do GOOD things out in the wild, we just don't want their creepy little bodies in our homes). If my husband IS home, and the insect is larger than an ant, I scream his name and then scream the insect's name, and my husband knows what to do.
Brown recluse....ecchhhh.
I too am deathly afraid of spiders. I will step on them, but not if I'm wearing flip-flops. My worst bug story, I once came home from work and my two cats were in the living room batting something back and forth. When I got a good look I realized it was one of those prehistoric bugs (centipede, millipede, whatever). I was terrified and would not get near it. I stood on the couch throwing shoes at it and crying. I finally hit it after about the 15th shoe (for the record, my fiancee and I lived in an apt with a huge foyer and we tended to let the various shoes pile up, I was never so thankful for that mess as I was that day). Ugh, bugs, gross.
LMAO! While I really don't like bugs or arachnids, they really don't bother me. We have all sorts of creepy crawlies living in my house - regular black crickets, brown cave crickets, spiders, just to name a few - live in my basement. Creeps my daughter out something fierce when she's feeding her furball, I mean rabbit, when a cricket jumps on her. Have you seen a cave cricket? They look like a cross between a huge spider and a cricket. I usually laugh myself silly at her reaction. Any tiny spider I find, like the banana spiders (what I call them, don't know the actual name) I leave alone to eat any flies that get in. Like I tell my daughter, spiders are our friends. If we didn't have spiders, the bug population would take over our world. Of course, mind you, if I find one crawling on me - it's history.
Any and all bugs that dare make their way into this house will get sucked up by the central vacuum hose. No squishing involved (I hate that crunching noise) and I don't have to get any closer than about 6 feet away from them.
I'm a homeschooler too but there's no freaking WAY I'm capturing any crawly things in a jar.
Ugh. I can usually handle spiders, but brown recluse spiders are too scary.
Even further evidence that you are normal...:-)
Courtney, she is more than likely referring to Silverfish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverfish
..as centipedes are not as likely to go indoors-let alone in suburban STL. =)
I had one of those crawl across the floor while our TV was on late at night when the lights were off. It freaked the bejesus out of me because it looked like a massive spider at first.
Spiders and bugs don't bother me much, but birds, OHMYGAWD. I hate them. They are just flying rats to me.
Adorable monsters by the way. The paper ones, not the kids. :)
OMG Susan! I have encountered the cave crickets! I used to call them spider-grasshoppers when I was little, because they are definitely jumpy little ninja bugs. Eeehhhck!
I actually got the hebbie jebbies reading this post. EWWWWWWW.
Hey, just stepped on one of those guys last night. So many legs. They are freaky.
Also, we had brown recluse spiders at our old house. They are hard to get rid of. And yeah, wheen you find a few, you get pretty good at identifying them.
OMG spiders. There was a spider on the trunk of my car at Target and it freaked me out so much I put my bags in the backseat, avoiding the trunk altogether.
...I was even MORE freaked out when the spider then disappeared and magically reappeared on the trunk once I arrived at Dierbergs. I'm pretty sure it was in the trunk. So in the CAR. The car I was driving. I probably would have crashed the car had I seen it inside with me.
I have gone through and turned on ALL lights in my basement, and replaced all burt out bulbs, in hopes that there are no brown recluse spiders milling about as I clean out the basement. And it's ALL I can think about now. Thanks for that.
My SIL caught one of those spiders at an old house they rented when she was first married. She even put her foot on one side of it to sort of shoo it in the jar. When she took it to the lab she dropped it of at, they told her it was the biggest Brown Recluse they'd ever seen and that they were surprised she was able to capture it.
Why, you ask?
Because those spiders jump.
*shudder*
Are all of the commenters from the midwest? Where most of the bugs freeze to death in the winter?
My daughter, born in central Missouri, never saw a cockroach till she was 7 and we were moving to New Orleans. There was a big one strutting down the sidewalk in Dutch Alley (French Quarter, close to Coffee Call beignet shop). I showed it to her - she examined it like it was a zoo animal. It didn't pay attention to us - it had things to do and strolled off - maybe to the public women's bathroom. It was about 3 1/2 inches long. If we had touched it, it might have decided to fly.
Anyway, all y'all who are bug-shy will have to toughen up if you come down south of I-10. This includes Disney in Orlando. You could possibly spend all your time freaking out over bugs if you find yourself in the gulf south.
Ooooo I feel yer pain hon - My own personal nemesis is the Western Conifer Seed Bug (don't google it unless you are feeling especially brave). They like to come indoors when it gets cold outside. Gah! And they fly. Double gah!
And your bravery in the face of such monsters has inspired me to tag you! Yay! This is my first tag - I hope you enjoy! It's an easy one - just 6 random things (you can even make things up! I do all the time!)
More info here: http://astrogirl426.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-very-first-tag.html
Have fun, hon!