Creepy, crawly Saturday

Warning: this post has a lot of pictures that one who is skittish may not like very much, but I felt like the pictures really made the story. And it is a semi-long story!!

The Day started out like any other. But then Parker came down stairs all excited because his tarantula had crawled up the glass in the night and was at the top of his cage. This is the exact reason I insisted on a LOCKING top. They have been known to push the lid off the non-locking tops and escape. I like Hairy, but not in my house.

So, the morning progresses. Around here, everyone has their houses sprayed for bugs, and for good reason. The world's deadliest spiders are found right here in Texas. There are sooooo many bugs around here. I have never seen so many bugs in my life. Anyway, so we had the inside of the house re-sprayed this last week, and Maris was touching up the outside with the Ortho Home defense stuff around the windows and in the eaves, etc. While he was spraying out by the front door, this little Black Widow came crawling out to die:

So then, we decided to go to the Heard Museum http://www.heardmuseum.org/ with the Egans. They have this exhibit of live snakes that are indigenous to Texas. We knew the kids would love it. It was a really neat museum with a ton of hands on exhibits and information about the plants and wildlife that is around here. We are loving getting to know the area and appreciate the differences between here and home. Here is Liza and Rhegan looking at the bones and butterflies.

This interesting exhibit showed us the differences between a common water snake and a deadly cottonmouth. They both really looked similar, so we made sure that Parker and Tyler could see how much the same they look, so they should just STAY AWAY from them.
Below is the Cottonmouth Water Moccasin. Ewwwwww!!!
I can't remember what the one below is, but I do know that I don't ever want to see one.

Below is a harmless garter snake. I thought that his orange and green stripes were cute. They also have those one snakes here that are yellow and black and red and POISONOUS. They are pretty, but bright for a reason.

So then we went on a hike through the area. Hikes here are different, because there are no mountains to hike through, just wooded areas and swampy places. We enjoyed the pretty trees and the sounds and the butterflies and the birds. We saw some interesting spiders in webs and saw lots of frogs. We stayed on the trail so as not to encounter other stuff.....ewwwww. Liza liked it for a while, but the hotter and sweatier and stickier we got, the less she liked it. The boys were in heaven!!

Liza kept picking up sticks and flipping them around, we asked her to stop, but you know how tempting sticks can be :). Suddenly she shrieked. Very loudly. Something got her on her back and her leg and bit and/or stung her. So today she is very itchy and quite swollen!! We don't know what it was, but we are watching for the red line to come up from it that will tell us if it is poisonous or not. Liza said THAT is why she doesn't like to play outside.

We went to Braum's and got some ice cream and came back home to enjoy our bug-free environment!! Well except for the tarantula. But he's in a cage...:) It was a great day by our standards, cuz ya know a lot of people in our house like that kind of stuff!!