Spider Week

I must say I'm glad Spider Week is over, though I tried to be a good sport about it. I wore spider earrings every day (shades of Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus) and talked a lot about how spiders (other than black widows) are our friends.

All week long I kept thinking something was crawling up my leg, or in my hair.

The planned activities for the week were OK, but could have been better. It's always a crap shoot. We sang the Itsy Bitsy Spider song once or twice, and recited Little Miss Muffet a few times.

Drawing spider webs worked out OK, I guess.

Spider brownies were a horrible failure, because I overbaked them. They were rock hard and we couldn't get any of the pretzel stick legs to go in them. So we wrote letters on them with frosting instead.

Spider hats were more successful.

And math with spider balls worked out quite well, except that now there are spider balls all over the house.

We hung our spider windsock outside as an early Halloween decoration.

Finally today we did the activity I'd been avoiding all week: we went looking for real spiders. I had a book out of the library called "Spiderology" and it gave instructions for making a spider "inn." So we made one.

There were two spiders in Dad's bathroom that I'd been kind of "cultivating" all week (i.e., not killing), so with extreme cautiousness and squeamishness I managed to get them out of their corners and into the spider inn.

The spiderology book recommended catching bugs for the spiders to eat, but that would have involved taking the plastic wrap and rubber band off the jar, and I was sure that while putting the bug in, the spiders would have come out, so we didn't do that. We looked at them for a while, photographed them of course, attempted to count their legs... and finally gave up and ran outside and let them go. Over by the tortoises, where there are already many other spiders.

((((shudder))))

These are the most harmless little spiders you could ever imagine, and still they gave me the creeps. OK, Spider Week is over, onward and upward.

 

Postcript: One more bit of Spider Week. Dinner