my biggest phobia

What better topic for Friday the 13th than spiders!

Someone the other day asked me if I had any phobias...and I didn't even think before I answered "SPIDERS!" I'm not scared of snakes...in fact I have no fear to just pick one up. I almost did one day when Pat found a huge gardner snake in our yard...I wanted to pick it up to look at it but Pat freaked out! That's his biggest fear.

But spiders...you'll understand by taking a look at this picture. It started in high school when my dad pulled up up a ladder from the pool and there were tons of these under each step. He just sprayed them off with a hose and they ended up in my room because it was the closest to the pool.

Many years later they have come back to haunt me! We've always had the occasional spider in our house, mostly small, but sometimes big. But this past fall these lovely wolf spiders took over our house! It started one lovely morning before work when I turned on the light to our bathroom to see a massive spider just chillin on our bathroom floor. Of course I screamed and grabbed the nearest shoe and smacked the spider. I saw something and couldn't believe my eyes...tiny little spiders were crawling off of the huge spider that I just killed. I lost it! I screamed and jumped on Pat in the bed and was crying. It was like something right out of a movie! He kept telling me to calm down...it's just a spider. But baby spiders came crawling off of it!!! Not just a spider to me!!! He killed all the "baby" spiders with his fingertip (that's how small they were). After we had a lot of these in our house I read up on them and found out that they carry the babies on their back until they develop. Gross!

Well that must have just been the first mom of many because soon after they literally took over our house. Every morning there would be one in our bedroom or bathroom, one would run out from under the door when we let Truman out and one would greet us at the door when we got home from work. And these things are fast! You have to be stealth-like to kill them otherwise you lose them because they run so fast and hide...even though they're so big! Truman would ran after a couple and made me lose them before killing them. Every time I'd freak out about one, Pat would continue to say that God was trying to help me get over my fear of spiders. I certainly didn't think that plan was working so well!

I had a break down every so often because I just could not handle how many there were! Not only did we have the huge ones but we started to get what Pat and I called "juniors." They were the same spiders but not fully developed. We started a tally on our chalk board of how many "big" spiders we had killed and how many "juniors" we had killed. In three weeks we got up to 20 something and almost 10 juniors!!!

The last large wolf spider we killed was caught in the pantry eating some kind of crumb on the floor. Instead of killing it right away, Pat got a flash light and watched it eat...gross!!! I cleaned out the pantry right after that.

One of our friend's son is fascinated by bugs. Chrissy, his mom, told me I should catch one of the spiders and bring it over for him to see. This kind of helped me get over my fear but we never saw a big one after that!

We've only had a couple of juniors this winter so far but I'm fearing the comeback in the spring. We might have to bring in some professionals if that happens!