Mama Spider

I was in the garage this morning and noticed a huge spider inches from my feet. It was big, fat, brown and hairy - probably about four inches from leg to leg (and not stretched out legs). Without panicking (Hubby had already left for work) I calmly went into the kitchen and got a glass to put over it. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to smash it because I was hoping to identify it. I didn’t want to let it go free, for obvious reasons. So, I covered it with a glass and went about my day thinking I’ll let Hubby take care of it later. After school my grandson was looking at it and came into the house and told me it was a female spider. “Really, how can you tell?” I replied. “Because it has a bunch of babies,” he answered. My heart sank. I imagined the ending of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ when hundreds of baby spiders hatch out of the egg sac. Sure enough, there was an egg sac and a bunch of itty, bitty spiders crawling all over the place under the glass. “Look how cute,” the three-year old exclaimed. Her favorite video is ‘Wilber’ (translated Charlotte’s Web). At least she wasn’t afraid of it. Now the eleven year old granddaughter is a different story. She joined me in feelings of being totally ‘creeped out.’ The boy was thrilled, of course. He wants to take it to school tomorrow. When Hubby came home, we transferred the new mother and babies to a jar (that was challenging) and put the lid on it. Hubby wanted to know if I wanted to put a hole in the lid. “Yeah, right,” I’m thinking. But since I’m trying not to be so sarcastic these days I sweetly said, “I think the babies might escape if we put a hole in the lid.” “Oh, yeah, the babies,” he muttered, returning to sanity. We spent quite a bit of time on the internet trying to identify it but we are far from experts on arachnids (it’s a word, I looked it up!). So now the jar is sitting on the desk with a big ole spider in it. I think the mother has eaten some of the babies and the babies are crawling all over the mother. Maybe they are trying to eat her. As I recall in the movie, Charlotte died before her little ones came into the world, leaving Wilber to take care of the egg sac. So why isn’t this thing dead yet? And I don’t remember any cannibalistic scenes either!