temporus | Attack of the eight-legged beast.

Warning: This post involves children, spiders, potty, and bubbles. Not necessarily in that order. If these things frighten you, turn back now.

Tonight, as I was giving the boys their nightly bath, I was blowing bubbles at them. The bubbles were a reward to the older boy, because he did his potty before bath without argument, and hey, I'd probably do it anyway, but you know, rewarding them for doing good things you want them to do just makes sense. But back to the boys. There I was blowing bubbles to them, and they very much enjoy catching them out of the air and attempting to eat them. The Little Man, he's old enough that it's all just a game, and he's having fun. The MiniMonkey (okay, still trying to come up with a good alternate name there) I don't think he's old enough to realize exactly what the bubbles are, and mostly just does whatever his older brother does. So if the older one tries to eat the bubbles, he does too.

So I'm blowing bubbles, alternating back and forth between the two boys, so everyone gets their fare share, and I suddenly notice a black spider crawling on my one year old's head. It takes me a moment to register, that yes, indeed, that small crawling black thing with the long skinny legs, etc, etc, is in fact, a spider. It's not really a huge spider, as far as spiders go, and I've certainly seen larger in the house before. (I am the designated destroy of all things creepy and crawly in the house, so I am fairly familiar with the local fauna of that nature.) This one though, has that "classic" spider look that really kind of says both "I'm creepy" and "I'm evil" even though it's just a spider. Not, to my knowledge a poisonous one, but you know, it's on my one year old, so I react.

Now, I'm not particularly arachnophobic. Unlike, say my wife, who fully admits to having an irrational fear of spiders. She used to jump at my friend Robb's belt buckle which was a cast pewter tarantula. But even so, I have a reasonable fear of small creatures whose bites could potentially give someone a lot of pain, or with some species even death. Yeah, I know that it's unlikely to run into a spider that could kill an adult. But see, this one was on my kid. My one year old. So, I got to knock it off my son's head. At the last minute pulling my blow, thinking I didn't want to startle it into biting my son. Either the thing's spider sense tingled, and it dodged me, or I didn't hit it hard enough because next thing I know it's on my son's shoulder. After the next swat, it's on his forearm, and this time instead of swinging at it, I just grab my son's arm and dunk it good under water.

So the bugger is now floating in the bath. With my sons. And the older one is all interested in what's going on, and nosing his way toward the dang thing. The younger one is flailing about and splashing, not out of a reaction to the spider that was just on him or fear or anything, but because he thinks we've changed up the game and now it's splash time. I have to divide my time and attention between keeping the older one back, the younger one from splashing too much so that I lose track of the spider, and rummaging around in the bath for a random toy I can use to scoop up the critter, who is doing its level best to swim for shore. I manage to scoop it up on a flat little disk, then spend the next few seconds rotating the disk with both hands as fast as I can, because the critter has gotten his legs back under him, is kinda pissed at being dunked in a bath he didn't ask for, and was trying to run either away from me, or toward me. The rational part of my brain says away, because it's had enough. The irrational part of my brain says toward me, because it wants payback, and someone's got to get bit for the indignity of an attempted arachnacide. I manage to get it over the toilet and start to shake the disk.

It didn't actually occur to me at that moment, that spiders are rather well known for their ability to stick to surfaces and all, and that attempting to shake it off probably wasn't going to work. Luckily for me, the spider saw new terrain, decided it didn't like the old one, tossed some silk out the back to latch on to the disk he'd been standing on, and attempted to rappel down. Unfortunately for the spider, it didn't notice until about a centimeter from the surface that it was being tricked into another body of water. As it tried to pull an about-face and start climbing back up the web, I lowered the boom and managed to get it dunked into the toilet. I reached over, slammed down the plunger, watched the water start to funnel into the bowl, then shut the lid.

That, was that.

I'd had enough by that point of the bubbles. Even though the bubbles had nothing what-so-ever to do with the situation, I'd managed to set off enough adrenaline during the encounter, that I needed to clear stuff away as a way to calm myself down. I rinsed my son's hair, more because it made me feel better at the moment than because I was worried that the spider had left muddy footprints or anything. Instead, I just settled back and tried to relax.

And then for some reason, why I'll never really know, I turned back to the toilet, and opened the lid.

That bastard was back. It was standing on the top of the water, looking around as if trying to assess how to get himself out of this mess. I flushed him down the toilet. And he survived it. Normally, I'm impressed by a critter when it manages to be that tough or wily. But this thing, it had landed on my baby, and even though it hadn't actually done any harm, had freaked me out, and now it had to die!

I walked to the closet, pulled out the most dangerous looking cleaning chemical I could grab within a split second, stepped back into the bathroom and coated that toilet bowl with foaming suds of death. As long as that bugger was still kicking, I kept spraying. And then I sprayed some more. Because that's what you do to creatures that mess with your offspring. It's sort of a parental override that kicks in and you almost don't really have much control at that point. Then, when I was done launching chemical warfare at that tiny critter, I flushed the toilet. This time, I didn't shut the lid, but watched, very carefully to make sure that the spider went bye-bye. And then, I flushed it again. Just in case.

And it was gone.

I'm just thankful, that my older son didn't ask me to read The Spider and the Fly for a bedtime story. I normally enjoy reading it, but I think tonight that might have been a bit too much.