Tuesday, July 29, 2008

it was at least the size of a cantaloupe

Last night right before bed I stepped into the hallway to turn off the light and something caught my eye. It was a GIGANTIC spider crawling on the bed in the spare room. I probably could have killed it myself, but I wanted Bryan to see it, to raise his awareness of the spider situation in our home. Now, I am not a squealy girl who screams every time a tiny spider walks by. But 1.) we have been having a little bit of a problem with poisonous spiders called Fiddlebacks in our house lately and 2.) this was no tiny spider - its legs were quite possibly longer than mine.

So I called for Bryan to come in and make sure it wasn't the poisonous kind and to kill it. Bryan was less than thrilled about being called out of bed to smash a spider. He looked at it and made a half-hearted attempt to grab it with a kleenex. But the spider was apparently a seasoned criminal and disappeared under the bed in a flash.

Bryan said, "Well, it's just a harmless wolf spider. Let's go to bed."

Um, was he kidding? I wanted to see some spider carnage before I went back to bed. I mean, this thing was so big we could have strapped a saddle on its hairy back and ridden it into the Grand Canyon. And as Bryan suggested that we just go to bed, a vision flashed through my mind of that big hairy thing crawling over my infant son's head...or my toothbrush.

"Uh, I would rather try to find it and kill it first," I told Bryan.

Bryan's response was that he didn't even know where the flashlight was. At that point, I would have driven to Arkansas to get a flashlight if I had to. But, alas, I knew exactly where the flashlight was. So there we were, after 11 at night, laying on the floor with our butts in the air, looking under the bed for Spiderzilla.

In the end, I had to go to bed defeated. All night long, whenever the sheets touched me, I imagined it was my arachnid friend from the other room, coming to poop on me or lay eggs in my ear or just lick the chapstick off my lips.

It is such a curse to have an over-active imagination sometimes.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

bringing home baby

I know that I promised my next post would be telling all the details of my horrid hospital stay. And I really tried to think of how I could recount the tale and make it funny or even just amusing. But the problem is that writing about it is almost as bad as re-living the whole traumatic event. So I am going to have to sit on this one a while and try to come back to it later, perhaps after all my flesh wounds have healed. I hope you understand.

Instead, I will bring you a little up to date on our new life as a family of four. Plus one dog that eats her own poo. Bringing a baby home from the hospital is sort of like bringing a goldfish home from the pet store: you get really excited about bringing this little thing home only to realize that in all honesty it doesn't really DO very much. Like, you never hear someone say, "The other day I was at the park with my goldfish and this really cool thing happened..." You also never hear anyone say, "Yesterday, I was playing my Wii with my newborn baby and he did the neatest thing..." Or at least you rarely hear that.

But there are some real differences, too. For instance, a goldfish never shoots projectile diarrhea at you when you change its diaper. And if you go out shopping and leave your goldfish at home, no one calls DHS. And, a goldfish doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night twenty-seven million times with a Scream So Shrill That You Want To Cut Off Your Own Ears just to let you know that he is hungry. Again.

Other than that, though, it's pretty much the same thing. And things are going well.