Who cares about snakes, I am scared of SPIDERS!

I have blogged about my snake "issue". When you live in the country you have snakes. When you have chickens you have even more snakes. Snakes are a part of life out here and they scare me a bit, but unlike my husband I am not terrified of them. I figure if one of us gets bit we will be fine. Scared almost to death, sure, but we will live.

Well, now I have met my true match, face-to-face. I have to confess I have an unreasonable fear of spiders.

Don't misunderstand me, in many ways I love spiders. They can be beautiful and I love looking at their spectacular webs, especially in the mornings and after soft rains when they are covered in dew. Very lovely. I also adore the fact they eat annoying insects like flies and mosquitoes. Thank you for that spiders.

I am also a bit superstitious and if I find one inside I try to rescue it and put it outside, if possible. I never squish spiders under my feet (gross) and I try to limit how many I flush down the commode. As little Imp says, "Poor spider!".

My kids love and respect spiders also. However, they don't have the natural fear of them that they should. Too much Bear Grylls as I mentioned before... I want my boys to be manly men eventually and be able to scoop up spiders that scare their girlfriends. I am proud they love nature and all living things (other than fire ants and mosquitoes). However, there are some things we should fear.

So yesterday late afternoon the boys were playing on the back porch. I noticed they had found something interesting and were examining it, but they do that all of the time with beetles, doodlebugs, butterflies, geckos, etc. Finally I go over there to see what they are so excited about and it is a black spider. A pretty shiny black spider with 4 tiny red dots down its back.

"What a pretty black spider" I tell the boys as I am poking it with a tiny leaf to move it away from my back door. Sure, I know a little about spiders and one year I even dressed as a black widow for Halloween. I will never forget that costume my Mom made me. Unfortunately we under-stuffed the 8 arms and they were a bit floppy and I didn't win the costume contest or even place in it, but I loved that costume.

Luckily for my dear boys I am a bit of a self-proclaimed spider expert and I knew that black widows had an red hourglass on their backs. And this one had cute little shiny red dots. Pretty spider.



As I was playing with my pretty little spider I accidentally flipped it over. And my heart almost stopped. Pretty little spider had a lovely red hourglass on its tummy. Pretty little black shiny spider was a BLACK WIDOW!



I have lived in this area my entire life and never seen a real black widow spider. I instantly jumped up and grabbed the boys and looked at their bare feet and asked "did either one of you get bit?". They assured me no, but Imp had a little red bite on his foot (a fire ant bite, but I was not sure at the time). I grabbed a glass jar, shoved the spider in there with a stick (to show the doctors in case my boys were bit, Moms are fearless when their kids are involved) and dragged them inside to wash and inspect their feet/legs and make sure they did not start getting terribly ill.

My boys were fine, thank goodness. And when Dad got home I showed him our little pretty friend in the glass bottle. Please don't read the rest of this paragraph if you are P.E.T.A. or have a soft spot for black widow spiders playing around your children. My dear sweet husband poured rubbing alcohol in the bottle and after some time the spider got drunk and passed out. She is still passed out today so I guess she is sleeping off her binge. ;-)

Now her little bottle is sitting on my kitchen windowsill so I can be reminded of the dangers outside... I hate to use any type of poisons around my yard, but this one time I am going to buy some pesticides and spray around my house. If there is one black widow out there, there are probably more and I think I am not a huge fan on my boys playing with black widow spiders.

Now I must mention Photoshop and Photoshop Elements or all of my google ads will be about spiders. :-) I actually used Lightroom to process those images above and just cropped them down in CS4. I was a bit too overwhelmed to take my camera out yesterday and photograph my little spider friend before she "passed out", so the images were taken today in my kitchen. No natural light, it is horribly stormy today. Hopefully the rain will wash all of the black widows away.

Did I mention that we don't have screens on most of our windows and my husband told me that it might be a good idea to not leave the windows open for a while? He used to say that because of the snakes (we found one in the toilet long ago, but that is another story for another day, but always look in a toilet BEFORE sitting down) but now I am more willing to listen to him because of the black widows. Don't want one of those in my bed!

And I also realize I am NOT a spider expert. In fact, I am an idiot when it comes to spiders, and I am going to make sure my boys both have a healthy fear of all spiders, just in case. We do have brown recluse spiders out here and I am afraid they might look a bit like Charlotte. Next time we read that book I will mention that Charlotte can bite and it is best to leave her alone.

Oh, and no more sticking bare feet in our rubber boots...