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09/30/2005 Archived Entry: "spiders, rocks and cursive"

Word must have gotten out among the spiders in our neighborhood. We don't kill any harmless ones that reside outside of the house. We figure they will help take care of wasps, yellow jackets and annoying flies. However, the number of spiders living here has doubled recently. They are building intricate an amazingly large webs that we must be very careful to avoid. Last night we saw one spider whose size surpassed our tolerance and was definitely in the creepy category. His body was roughly the size of a nickel, way out of our comfort zone. Sadly, he is no more. Neither is his cousin that was only half the size, but still too large. Today I found their other cousin who was somewhere in between the first two. He must have watched last night though because when he saw me coming he immediately ran into the tree.

Aside from killing spiders, we spent most of last evening cleaning up rocks in Tabitha's playhouse area. We have a new ground cover that will go over the whole area and make the rocks unnecessary. Better due to the little one anyway. We're also replacing the fencing and flowers due to an unfortunate incident. There's a lot of rocks though so it's taking a bit of time, especially since our work is relegated to the after dinner hours due to the high daytime temps.

Today Tabitha had her first drop-off play date. All the mother's of her friends are my friends so we always visit together. But she had asked me a while ago if she could be dropped off sometime so I arranged it with a nearby friend and today was the day. It went well, but I didn't get to visit with my friend whom I haven't really talked to in ages. Next time I'm staying, hmph.

After Chris and I picked up Tabitha, we thought dinner out sounded like a good idea so we went to Chili's. Boy was Daisy a handful! We haven't gone out, I guess, since she started pulling up and that made things very difficult. She tolerated the high chair for a while, but she was way more interested in watching us try to get everything out of her reach. Fun fun! She wasn't really disruptive though and we had a good time, even if the salsa did taste like someone added soap to them. We actually sent it back, it was that bad.

I finally got a picture of a sample of Tabitha's handwriting. This is the first page of the story that she's writing. She adds a little more to it each day. I think it's rather good for a 6 year old. The only problem is people treat her writing like they used to treat her reading. They say very loudly and incredulously "She writes in cursive?!" Annoying, to be sure. But she's older now and I don't think they will make her self conscious, especially since she has a rather, shall we say, healthy ego?