Spider Hunting

Hannah has a new favorite pastime - spider hunting. While we both tend to be constantly scanning corners and crevices for the creepy crawlies, our reasons couldn't be any more different. Like any normal person, I am on the lookout for them out of fear, while Hannah just wants to get the next game of Spider Hunting started.

I wonder if any of my genes actually got passed down to her, or she just morphed directly from Jeff.

This isn't a game I necessarily disagree with, however. She often does a better job at squashing them than Jeff - who often misses or drops the spider mid air, which sends me jumping around as if the floor itself is on fire until it is found. But when it is 6:15 a.m. and I can hear the garage door closing as Jeff leaves for work, the last thing I want to hear is, "Mommy! I see a spider. LET'S GO SPIDER HUNTING!!!!!"

With Jeff being gone, that leaves only me to play the game with her. And, as luck would have it, spiders tend to lurk in high places, so I get to do the dirty work and hand the kleenex with the squished goods to Hannah so she can dance her way to the bathroom and sacrifice the spider to the Porcelain God.

But she recently changed the rules of this game - never a good thing. "I don't want to flush it, I want to be the spider's mommy," she tells me. Ugh! I can deal with a lot of rather disturbing things - naming and carrying dead ladybugs around on her adventures all day or picking up ants and putting their crushed little bodies in a circle on the driveway so they can have a tea party ... but becoming a spider's mommy was too much. Not knowing how to react, I just yanked the kleenex out of her hand and threw it in the toilet. I couldn't think of anything else to say other than, "Spiders don't need mommies!"

Cue the drama. Perhaps I was a bit too harsh and inadvertently squashed some of her maternal instinct in addition to the spider. Oh well ... what's done is done, and there will not be any harboring of spiders in this house!