Not Scared

I keep a pretty clean house. I want to begin by saying this, so that the following story does not lead you to imagine piles of unwashed clothing in dusty heaps all over my kids' bedrooms, or cobwebs strung in every corner like some kind of haunted house. This is not the case. There might be the stray toy or water cup rolling around, there might be a shirt here and there that didn't quite make it to the laundry hamper, but I sweep and vacuum and dust and all that, I DO, and so it makes the following all the more wrong:

Today, when I went to get Eli up from his nap, a SPIDER crawled out of a fold in his blanket. The blanket that was covering his tiny, innocent, sleeping body. Not a small spider, either. Not a huge, Arachnophobia spider, but one large enough that before it darted away, right out from under the shoe I was wildly flailing at it, I got a good look at its color and little pincers and beady, frightened little eyes. I'm sure they were less frightened than MY eyes, though.

After that initial gasp of horror and attempt at murder, I breathed deeply, removed my son quickly from his crib, and then as calmly as possible hurried the kids out of the room so that I could do what I must without terrifying them for life. Then, it was time to hunt that effer down. No spider preys on my sleeping baby and lives to tell the tale.

BUT. I could not find it again. I shook out the blankets, pulled off the top sheet and the mattress protector, looked under the mattress itself, pulled the crib completely out from both walls, and moved the storage tubs that were under the crib. Nothing. It took quite a long time to find this nothing, too, as I was completely terrified of coming upon the spider and having it dart up my own arm and, say, into my sleeve. So I was moving kind of slowly and gingerly.

I'd take a deep breath, give myself a little pep talk along the lines of, "Sarah, you wuss, you've given BIRTH. I think you can handle hunting down a medium sized spider without hyperventilating. Pull yourself together." And then I would, for a minute: I'd muster just enough strength to yank back a sheet or shove out an edge of the crib, and then visions of the spider skittering suddenly out of its hiding place and up my body would reappear, and I'd yelp a little and jump back in terror. (See why I didn't want the kids to witness this?) It was kind of a two steps forward, one step back process.

So, no spider. But I did find some sizable gaps between the floorboards and the baseboards behind Eli's crib, so I'm guessing that's where our eight legged friend is lurking. I did my best to dissuade him from returning: stripped the sheets, Lysol-ed down the mattress, cleaned the dust off the tops of the storage tubs, cleaned the baseboards and the floor itself, removed all the stray little toys that had been dropped behind the bed... I even began folding up baby wipes and shoving them in the cracks between the floor and the trim before I realized that my little choo choo was beginning to veer from the tracks a little. I also considered caulking, but realized that would be a disaster if we ever wanted to replace the trim in there.

All in all, I think I managed to conceal MOST of the crazy from my kids, but I'm sure Addy wasn't completely oblivious to my panic at the idea of a spider in a bed. She keeps saying, "You got that spider, Mommy? You got him? He in time out?" And I say, "Yes, honey, of course I did. He was a naughty spider who came in the house where he doesn't belong, so he's in time out."

What. I'm hardly going to tell her that monster is still roaming free. No need for both of us to be wide eyed and awake tonight, flinching at every rustle of the sheet against our skin.