Fold My Laundry Please

I looked over at my beautiful little girl yesterday.  She was sitting on the floor amusing herself with something and giggling happily.  "How sweet," I thought, "she’s certainly enjoying herself.  I wonder what she’s playing with?"  She was batting something around, but it was moving funny across the ground.  I watched for a minute before realizing that whatever it was wasn’t just rolling around, it was running away.  A closer look revealed that the thing was fairly large and hairy and was behaving in a way that seemed a bit panicked.  Suddenly, I figured out what it was.  It was a big. Hairy. Wolf spider!  *shudder*  A wolf spider that my 22 month old baby girl was trying to pick up; for what purpose, I can’t even imagine. 

I, being the Mommy, want to set a good example for my children.  I want them to know that there is nothing to be afraid of about insect-like creatures, despite my unreasonable fear of spiders.  So I decided to display this shining example by whipping Aurora up off the ground and running 6 feet away.  I stopped just six feet away instead of my desired one mile away because the thought came to me that it needed to die and that task wouldn’t be accomplished if I didn’t throw something at it before it ran off.  At this point Ethan, started bouncing around me asking over and over again, "What are you doing, Mommy?  What’s going on?"  I turned around to locate the beast only to find it scurrying after us rapidly, apparently on the attack.  This is when I screamed.  I mean really screamed.  Like, I got a call two minutes later from an unnamed B-movie director asking me to do the scream-track for his next slasher movie sort of screamed. 

This scream resulted in two things.  The first was that Ethan ran to the furthest corner of his bedroom, curled up into the fetal position, and began sobbing uncontrollably.  The second was that the hairy little ogre chasing me stopped dead in its tracks.  I don’t think spiders can hear noise, but surely it heard that scream!  This pause in the action was when I took the opportunity to get a grip, both on reality and on a nearby shoe (because I had no Clorox Clean Up handy).  I had noticed how my overreaction had affected Ethan and now I had to initiate damage control.  I seized the opportunity and announced bravely, "Back, Furry Fiend!  Eat shoe!" At which point I threw that shoe at the spider, immediately scoring a direct hit!  It did its dead spider routine and curled up into a ball and expired. 

"Alright," I said, "which brave boy wants to flush him down the toilet?"  Because that’s what you do with dead critters, you flush them down the toilet.  Also, there was absolutely no way on earth that I was ever going ot touch that thing.  I very bravely walked past the corpse and got a few tissues out of the bathroom.  Ethan had come over to verify that the enemy was down.  He was still wimpering, but at least he had come out of the corner.  Gideon was sitting next to spider beating it into a fine powder with the shoe that was still lying on the floor.  I offered the wad of tissues to Ethan who flinched as though I had swung a butcher’s knife in his direction.  Gideon reached up and grabbed the tissues, picked up the dead spider with them and then shook the spider out into the toilet. 

"Throw the tissues in, too." 

"No, I wanna watch him swirl around!"

"Whatever floats your boat."

Suddenly, fear gripped me again.  My baby had been playing with a creature that hunts.  That means it also bites.  Creatures that feel threatened bite.  Did that devil spawn bite my Precious Princess Baby Sweet?  I found Aurora, who was hiding behind a box being mad at me for interrupting her play, and started to search her hands, arms, and legs for bite marks.  She fought me off the whole time, spitting and scratching like a cornered alley cat.  "You can’t play with spiders because they bite, Baby.  I don’t want you to get booboos."  This bit of reason calmed her down enough for me to finish my inspection.  No apparent bites.  Good.  But I vowed to check again later in case they just weren’t showing up yet.  Surely there had to be several bites because she wasn’t exactly being gentle with the spider. 

But aren’t some spider bites poisonous? 

I turned to Mr. Google and shouted, "Officer Ugh!  Officer Ugh!  How do I get the number to Officer Ugh?!?!"  The internet is a wonderful thing and the phone number to our local Poison Control Center came up instantly. 

"Poison Control.  What can I help you with?"

"Do you happen to know if wolf spiders are poisonous?"

"Wolf spiders aren’t the poisonous ones."

"Oh, thank goodness!  I just found my 22 month old playing with one on the floor and I can’t tell yet if she got bitten or not.  I just thought I’d call and make sure."

"We get calls like that all the time.  In fact, usually it’s something like the mother found her child with a spider leg sticking out of his or her mouth."

Suppressing gag reflex, "GAH!  Why would you tell me that?" 

"Oh, sorry.  Is there anything else I can help you with?"

After that, I was able to relax a little bit.  Not a lot, though, because we had been trying to get out the door to my doctor appointment when the whole incident started.  The car ride there was filled with questions about Officer Ugh, spiders, and was Aurora going to die of a spider bite, but we still managed to get there on time.  Good thing I started getting us ready to go early so that we wouldn’t have to stress about anything!