Down came the rain and...

We have a new pet, her name is Charlotte. Any guesses as to her species?

I will give you some hints
1- She is black and shiney
2- She has beautiful scarlet markings

Yeah, I know. She skeeves me out more than a little, but I have to admit, I am strangely fascinated. And it seems so appropriate that it's nearly Halloween.

The boys found her in the garage, she was building a big messy web under the wooden steps going into the house. She is also quite large and apparently very deadly.

We found one of those huge wolf spiders at my mom's house and put it in the jar with Charlotte, she wrapped him up lickity split, it surprised me a little that she could take down a big hairy beast more than twice her size without batting a little spidey eyelash. She then proceeded to suck on him for two solid days! It was astounding. Sorry, I don't have any pictures of Charlotte to share with you =0(

Wanna hear the really weird part? She isn't even our first Arachnid pet.

Shanae and I had a black widow pet when we were little, her name was Sheila. My uncle Corey found it in his house and captured it. We brought it home and fed her for several months then took her up into the canyon and let her go in the fall.

This is the third arachnid pet for my boys. We have had one previous black widow named Sheila the 2nd, and we had a beautiful orange cat face spider last year named Lilly. They are all very entertaining to watch.



This is Lilly, she is like the Angelina Jolie of the arachnid world don't you think?



She even has a tuff side like Angelina, here she is saying "Dude, you are makin' me mad and I am gonna eat you any second now if you don't BACK OFF!"

Our favorite memory was feeding Shelia the second an earwig. Oh the battle that ensued, it was like watching Godzilla vs King Kong...all of Tokyo was destroyed. It was a vicious struggle and it was a little iffy there for a while wondering which scary beast was going to win the day. I sat there in horror thinking "Oh no! My children are going to witness the destruction of their own pet! But alas Sheila won and we decided that in the future we would have to be desperate before we fed her any more earwigs.

We also made a mistake with poor Lilly. We have these large black beetles around our house and I thought "Oh, that will fill her up" so we caught one and put it in there with her. I was DOWN STAIRS, a whole floor away and heard this weird ticking sound, went upstairs to investigate and it was poor Lilly, she was banging on the lid of her jar with her little legs begging to be let out because the beetle had squirted some foul smelling juice at her. Oh my gosh, it was a horrendous smell! We had to give poor Lilly a whole new jar! We never repeated that mistake either.

So anyway... I don't know why I felt the need to share all of this. Probably a distraction from all the crap going on in my life right now. Because you know...when it rains, it pours and while it's not raining in the literal sense, it's raining in my basement, something to do with our dishwasher, we had waterfalls in our basement tonight, of course not until after B had left home for his graveyard shift *sigh* and of course right over my sewing table. I hope nothing is ruined, there was water everywhere. And that is just one of the lovely events not just in my day, but in this hole bad week I'm having.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

And just so you don't think we are totally crazy, we also have softer, fuzzier, cuter pets =0) But watch out, if you snuggle with them you get the "Chicken pox"