Our Spider

For the last several months, we've had a wood spider living in our window. Yes, it looks pretty creepy, but it's actually proven to be one of the best, if not most self-sufficient, pets we've ever had. It designed beautiful webs for us to look at and amazed us with its ability to catch and eat massive amounts of bugs. Satchel and Warren even hand fed it flies from time to time. Checking out what was in the web became a daily ritual for us all.


I once tried to get the boys to decide on a name for our spider, but they never could agree. Satchel suggested many unique names, some of which I'm sure came from Pokemon. Jiro wanted a more fun sounding name like, "Hoppy." In the absence of consensus, we just kept calling it our spider.


A couple of weeks ago, Warren found our spider clinging to dear life on one of the many sticks the boys have collected on our porch. It was freezing outside, so Warren brought the spider inside. He put it in a glass jar with a stick and some leaves, then threw in a fly for good measure.

Soon our spider laid its eggs and then patiently hung beside them...until she died. Warren thinks I should have done something to prevent our spider's death, since he was out of town, but I don't know what I could have done.

I'll miss our spider. I hope that Warren will someday move the eggs out of our kitchen so that we can watch the baby spiders grow up outside.