A Spider In The Night

This is just what it looked like too!

The story goes like this. I was sleeping peacefully in my bed at about midnight last night and I hear Cassie, my daughter, saying "mom, mom....". I open my eyes and she is standing over me and says, "We saw a really big really fast spider and then we lost it". Ok...now I am awake! I detest spiders in my house! So I crawl out of bed and we begin the spider search. They are sure it is in the curtains above the couch...somewhere. We get a big pole and begin poking at the curtains and then after about 5 minutes I see it....floating down on her web from the curtains to the floor...all three of us scream and of course the spider is gone. (Great....now I have seen it and it will haunt me the rest of the night!) So we search for about 30 minutes...move the couches and other stuff...no spider. I attempt to go back to bed but after about 5 minutes I hear, "Oh...there it is...hurry Mom!!!!!" So out of bed again I go. This time the horrid creature has rounded the corner and was nearing my bedroom!!! We are now going to have to search for the rest of the night until the creature is dead. Jessica, my middle daughter, says she 'floated' down behind the tv, playstation, computer, dvr, dvd player mass of wires and equipment...great....I begin searching with a flashlight in one hand...a stick in the other and bug spray under my arm. (Its ok...you can laugh). Then I see it (aaaaaggggghhhhhh) as it dashes across the baseboards and crouches in the corner by the front door. This is a BIG spider!! So I hand off the stick and take up my weapon of choice, the spray. I take aim....pause in fear...then shoot! Direct hit!!! The spider takes off in a running flipping sort of fashion, (surely screaming in spider language, "I'm hit, I'm hit!!"), and I try to keep an eye on where it stops. I think I know where it is and we begin moving more stuff around so when I strike again it cannot hide more. We find it and I spray it two more time but it still lives!! (huh?? what kind of watered down spray is this??) So I track her down(the kids have now decided it is a girl spider) once again sort of under the playstation and I spray yet again..this time she is going down! She heaves herself from the playstation back to the baseboards where I proceed to cover her butt in spray. This time she is not moving away but is still wiggling so all three of us stand and watch as she wriths and wiggles. Finally she is still and an entire other problem arises....We are all terrified that she is not really dead so Cassie takes control and proceeds to squish the spider so we can be sure she will not resurrect in the night and begin hunting us all down one by one! Ugh! Finally we get everything cleaned and straightened up and I get back into bed...now at about 1am!! Amazing isn't it how we can be so scared and intimidated by something so small and basically harmless (it was just a wood spider like in the picture above). Of course we call it huge but in reality it isn't even a hundreth of our own size! I just am so creeped out by them!! Amazingly I did not dream about spiders and bugs all night!