Mommm, there's a spiiiiDER!

A week or so after going into contract on this old farmhouse, David and I brought Hunter and our now defunct video camera (thanks to a little yellow lab) down to see the house. Nikki and Dallas were both busy with either work, or school, or marching band rehearsals or soccer games or something.....so I was going to video the house for them. This was important because our Nikki, brave little city girl that she was, was quite afraid of just what kind of house we were moving into.....(if you've read "Cracker House = Haunted House and shared our amusement at her jumping sixteen feet into the air at the crow of a rooster...then you'll understand!)

Hunter and I began by walking the 1/2 acre and videoing the barn, the fields and the exterior of the house.....as we walked from the front of the yard to the porch Hunter says to me with a tremble in his voice "Mom, there a spiiiideerrrr!" And you can hear me respond on the video "hush, Hunter".......

When we showed the video to Nikki and Dallas that evening, sure enough there was a spider ....in fact there were hundreds of them; big yellow and black banana spiders hanging from every place you could think of to look....and I'd been walking under trees, through bushes, and onto front porches totally oblivious to them.....until the video showed them in all their awesome-ness!

As I write this, I am facing the fact that we are entering spider season (as well as gnat season, fly season and mosquitto season!) and soon we'll be getting out those BB guns and making target practice of those spiders!

Spiders are so much of our daily life here in the country that when Hunter was assigned an art project that had to be based upon an actual "animal" encounter and using all natural materials (the only man made material to be allowed was glue and the backboard), we immediately came up with the idea of making spiders the focus of his project......so, we went on a mission......to catch a spider!

David got out the bug spray and the spray starch.......and one morning we got up to find a huge, dead, starched banana spider on the back porch bench......we carefully picked up that spider and placed him between two sheets of waxed paper and smashed the heck out of him with my very large New International Version Bible.....! That evening, Hunter and I found two more and starched the heck out of some of the web that surrounded them.....we gathered various types of leaves and twigs and then got out the modge podge and went to work.....

In the upper right corner are three banana spiders and if you look very closely toward the bottom left, you'll see a stick figure representing Hunter.........what you can't see is the spider web that covers the right side of the project.....! We had a great deal of fun working on this and I think his teacher was very impressed.....Hunter said that when she realized those were real spiders she stood up and introduced him to the class as "my first student who was a known serial killer....of spiders!"

I think she'd understand a bit better if she came here in a month or two.....maybe I should show her the video of the spiiiiDERS!