Creepy Crawlies

I still have a few posts to share from our vacation, but I'm going to take a break from that really quick and do a fun one about life in Florida.

Lately, my boys have been coming to me with all kinds of interesting things in their hands. Frogs, lizards, bugs, etc. all caught in our lovely backyard. I usually don't run for the camera in those moments, but here are pics from two times that I did.

Parker's lizard:








Lincoln's snail:





Lincoln wanted DESPERATELY to keep his snail as a pet, but we convinced him that the best place for him was back outside.


Speaking of pets, we joke that we have a pet spider. Back in April or May when the weather was starting to get really warm, we noticed that a humongous web had been built behind our house - between the roof and our air conditioner. It had about 5 medium sized spiders living on it. I'd never seen a web with more than one spider in it, so I pointed it out to the boys: "Look, a spider family!"

Over the next few weeks, one of the spiders kept getting bigger and bigger and each of the other spiders disappeared one by one (we wondered if the big one was eating them). Anyway, the really amazing thing is that this spider (now HUGE) has been living in that same web the entire summer and is still there today.



We've become strangely fond of this creepy little guy. I think it is because he seems like such a survivor. He's missing a leg (we don't know when that happened... but none of us remembers ever seeing him with all eight, so maybe it's a birth defect - do spiders have birth defects!?!). When we have a really heavy rainstorm, the boys always want to grab their umbrellas and go check on "their" spider to make sure he's ok and see how much his web is getting damaged.

To give you an idea of how big the web is:



web from the side:



The first thing Lincoln does every morning is look out the window to see if his spider is still there. As you can see in the picture below, he's right outside my bedroom window (which means he's about a foot from my head every night while I sleep).



We've seen him run up and down his web, but we've never seen him leave it. I keep reminding the boys that he'll probably go away when winter comes. I'm just glad they haven't named him!