Would You Like a Spider With That?

This morning at my parents house my mum made me a coffee.  I had already eaten the toast I made myself and sat down to watch Sunrise.  I was just about at the end of my coffee when I noticed what I thought was a bit of undissolved coffee in the last mouthful.  I swirled it around and it didn't disappear.  I briefly considered gulping it down, but took a closer look.  To my dismay, it was a small spider that was broken in half.  Surprisingly I didn't gag or freak out.  I pondered what had occurred and I really hope it was a crunchy old dead spider that fell from above into my cup and not a fresh, living spider that drowned in boiling hot water and then got chopped up by the stirring spoon.  If that were the case then I probably drank fresh spider gizzards!

Luckily for me spiders are not my "natural enemy" to quote the last Japanese girl, Taeko who stayed with us.  We had been talking about spiders when she said this and we chatted about how to kill them with fly spray.  I thought it was a translation issue... little did I know.

Later that day when she was in the shower, I urged my daughter, Chynna to grab her Halloween black widow plastic spider.  We snuck into Taeko's room and put the spider on her pillow.  I thought she'd walk into the room, give a little scream and we'd run in and have a good laugh.  But that didn't happen and after a while of waiting... I just forgot about it.

Taeko is a lovely girl... but being observant wasn't one of her strong points.  She also liked to stay up until 3am.  So the night of the spider on the pillow incident was no different.  At perhaps 3.10am there was a little tap on our bedroom door.  Ryan got up and found Taeko, sobbing as she pulled him to her room and pointed at the spider on her pillow, mentioning that she had sprayed it but nothing had happened (literally nothing because it was plastic!).  Ryan, of course, just picked up the spider and said Chynna must having been playing a joke.

I felt terrible when Ryan relayed the story to me... how was I to know that "natural enemy" meant mortal fear?

The following morning Taeko mentioned the spider briefly and how it took her an extra hour to calm down and get to sleep.  Ryan made a point of telling Chynna to stay out of Taeko's room and then, as if to retaliate, my little darling, Chynna dropped me right in it... Mummy was playing a joke.  That'll teach me to think I could get away playing a practical joke and then blame it on my four year old when it backfired.  I apologised profusely.

Mr C had a date with my right hand side stomach at my own hand today.  No probs, just the usual sting and redness.