Spiders and I are not friends. In fact I pretty much hate everything about them. Their creepy 8 legged bodies, how they crawl so quickly over any type of surface, how they have no respect for my personal boundaries and how they seem to think being anywhere near me is an ok thing to do.
So imagine my surprise when I came home last night from work, went in to the bathroom and discovered that some evil, conniving, trying to drive me insane mama spider decided my bathroom was the absolute best place to have her eggs hatch. Yup, my bathroom, countless baby spiders…everywhere…it was not pleasant! *shudder*
I don’t know much about spider birthing patterns, all I vaguely know I remember learning from Charlotte’s Web which I read as a child and only kind of remember. What I remember is Charlotte had a crap tonne of eggs, she died when they hatched, or right before, or right after…somewhere around the time they went from eggs to spiders she died so I have forever combined the two events in my head. In my world mama spider picks a spot she thinks is safe for the eggs, leaves them there, if she is lucky she finds a pig to watch over them, then dies as they are born. Is this correct? I dunno, shrug.
What made a mama spider think my bathroom was the perfect spot to leave her eggs I do not know but I sure as hell wish she hadn’t cause oh wow, anywhere near me is not a safe place to be if you are a spider.
After standing in shock for a minute or so I went in to full attack mode.
Me vs the spider babies!
There can be only one victor!
Aaaaand since I pay rent here I vote for me being the winner…just sayin! 😉 lol
Here is something you may not know about baby spiders, they share their web. Yup, that’s right, their web. What does this mean? This means that if you take a tissue, squish a baby spider, then remove the tissue from the wall with the intent to throw it out you actually end up pulling a super fine and delicate web away from the wall with the tissue, that webbing is covered with other baby spiders so you end up trailing webbing covered in baby spiders with you as you attempt to discard the tissue. Yeeeah, that happened. The baby spiders panicked and started climbing the webbing, aiming for my hand, my hand! So of course I panic and decide instead of trying to throw it out in the garbage I’m gonna dump the lot of them in the toilet and flush but the movement of my arm causes the web to sort of float backwards and instills in me the fear of them getting on me, or falling, or jumping, or dropping, basically of becoming free in the bathroom and scattering and me having to try to kill them all before they disappear in to nooks and crannies of the wall / baseboard. Ugh.
Something else about baby spiders? There are endless amounts of them. Endless! I don’t know how many I killed but the genocide seemed to go on forever. After squishing all the ones I could see I then sprayed everything with chemical cleaning products, scrubbed the bathroom down and went to have a cup of tea, finally able to relax…well, relax while constantly feeling creeped out and thinking I felt a spider web or spider on me. Thing is, when I went to the washroom a couple of hours later there were more of them! All over the place, again! So back in to attack mode I went, sigh. After killing the second wave of them I wasn’t sure what to do. Obviously the cleaning chemicals weren’t keeping them away, or killing them, which had been my hope. I didn’t know where they were coming from so not like I could go to the source, all I could do was keep killing them as they became visible. But I had to relinquish the field and go to bed which would give them a whole lot of hours to repopulate my bathroom. Not cool.
This morning when I got up the absolute last thing I wanted to do was go in to the bathroom. I reeeeally didn’t want to see how many had come in to the bathroom while I had been sleeping but not like I could seal off the bathroom and ignore it forever so in I went. I had to immediately start killing baby spiders, again, which was expected, sigh. There weren’t as many as I had feared there would be but there were still way more than I was comfortable with. They were on the wall, the sink, the cupboard door, the other wall…I wouldn’t be surprised if they crawled over my toothbrush during the night the sneaky little brats.
Twice more before leaving for work did I have to go in there and kill! kill! kill!
When I came home from work tonight I immediately opened the bathroom door to see just how many more I had to deal with. At first I didn’t notice any and got stupidly optimistic that I had either killed them all or the remaining ones decided to go elsewhere but then I stepped farther in the bathroom and realized that they were still there, just staying closer to the corner of the wall where they are harder to spot, well, except for an assault team which was on the far wall making their way to who knows where. All the visible ones were quickly dispatched to wherever spiders go when they die and I decided all this killing earned me some ice cream…yeah, I don’t really understand my logic either but oh well lol
Now it is nearing the time I should be going in to the bathroom to wash up for bed and all I can think is how I really don’t want to have to deal with more spiders, they are creepy, and en mass they are mildly terrifying because what if they figure out they could all attack me at once? I’d never be able to kill them fast enough! It’d be like when the little people took down Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, he didn’t stand a chance! Great…now I have images of myself tied down and at the mercy of baby spiders…should be interesting dreams tonight… 😉
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 