lisamoe

So last night, the kids and I are headed to the car to go to dinner, cause I'm too lazy to cook and I realize Dingo still has his lunch on his shirt. I run back into the house to get a clean shirt for him and when I come out, he's in the driveway wailing "MAMA, there's a GINORMOUS spider behind the van!!!" I walk over thinking, yeah, ginormous I bet, and then I see a big ol' tarantula in my driveway. A big hairy freaking tarantula. The boys are fascinated and run to get their Pops to come see it, and while they're all looking at it, I'm thinking I can't leave this freaking hairy spider out in my yard. I hate spiders and the bigger they are the more I hate them. So of course I called jorjedatoy and asked her if she wanted a big spider, cause she's weird that way. She said sure, bring it over, and I made Jesse catch it in a tupperware pitcher with a lid, cause he's fine with big spiders, and I very bravely drove it across town and dropped it off with her. I guess if she doesn't want to keep it she can put it in her yard, as long as it doesn't remain in my yard.

I think this brings the total of interesting animals in our yard over the last couple of years up to: possums, raccoons, turtles, lizards, various snakes, a black widow (dead, though) and a big hairy tarantula. This is in addition to the regular cats, squirrels, mice, doves, various other birds, and frogs. I've seen rabbits and foxes not far away but so far not in our specific yard. The tarantula we found, I'm thinking it's a native Oklahoma Brown, but jorje would probably know for sure. Maybe she'll put up a picture of it if she keeps it.

Yesterday we took the boys to the Oklahoma History Museum and to Frontier City. Frontier City was having their annual homeschool day and it was quite a good time. We rode a couple of nice roller coasters, the train, the log ride, the roaring rapids and a variety of round and round rides. Dingo rode a lot of kiddie rides too, and the tin lizzy cars. We spent part of the time with some other families from the Campfire group and that went well. We didn't leave the park til 9:30 last night and the boys were happily worn out and we were all soaked to the skin from the water rides. Was fun.

Today we've just been cleaning. Well, Jesse and I are cleaning. Dingo is mostly being sent to his room periodically for interfering with the cleaning. I promised Jesse if he'd actually help on the house I'd make pancakes for lunch, so he did and I did. He's been helping me sort and fold laundry and went around the whole house finding and washing out cans and bottles to put in the recycling. Maybe we'll go to a movie in a while.

Another low key day. Dingo and I hung around in the morning while Jesse was writing (well, typing, his handwriting is terrible) a pen pal letter to his friend in Ecuador. We had lunch at Romeo's/Zook's, picked up some water conditioner for the betta and have been cutting down small trees and cleaning up in Katrina's pen this afternoon. She's dug dozens of holes out there; it looks like a not very well organized minefield. And she's mangled all her toys and beds. A lot of what we cleaned up was shredded stuffing from bedding and soft toys. And she's eaten the wading pool and a couple of garden hoses and a bicycle pump and her food bowls. She has stopped flipping her doghouse over though. So maybe she's lessening to just a category 4 dog now...