Arachnophobia

I've never seen the movie Arachnophobia and I never plan to. My husband saw it before we met and he was never the same after that. When we were newlyweds living in a small apartment in Florida, I came to understand my husband's aversion to spiders when he found one on the ceiling above our bed. I was in the kitchen when I heard him yell. I run into the bedroom thinking, "What in the world?" His reaction seemed funny to me since he had a broom in his hands ready to do murder. It was just a spider, for Pete's sake. He asked me if I had ever seen the movie. I said, "Of course not." Four babies later, we end up battling another spider together. I'm being lazy as usual during my last trimester and I'm on the couch when I hear the boys yelling, "There's a tarantula!" over and over again. I turn to see what is going on and see Nat and Justin hovering on the stairs. Aidan is walking around looking for it and Caleb is no where to be seen. I gradually get my bulky self off the couch to waddle over to the stairs looking for whatever it is they think is a tarantula. Nat points to the floor near the bathroom and I finally find it. I squint at it and scoff, "That's not a real spider" and then it moved. It was one of those thin, brown spiders and it was big. Since I'm not one to scream like a total ditz, I yelled for my husband instead. I said, "You're the man of the house. Get up here and do your duty!" I looked down the stairs and there he was peeking around the corner with dread on his face. He came upstairs and had the same scoffing attitude I did of "yeah, right. Sure there's a spider." His expression turned from disbelief to shock when he got a good look at it. He asked, "Where's the spider spray?" I told him where to find it and told Nat to get one of daddy's shoes. Meanwhile, I'm trying to kill it with a cup and following it into the bathroom and out again. Husband stands 100 feet away from the thing and starts spraying. That just makes the spider move toward the couch. No way was that spider going to find a place to hide, so my husband grabs the couch and with one powerful move of his biceps he lifts the couch and growls, "Kill it!" in warrior-like fashion. I grab the shoe from Nat and slam it on top of the spider and I twist the shoe to make sure it had a horrible death. We both breath a sigh of relief and tell the boys the coast is clear. Two nights later, I'm in a dreamless sleep when I am awoken by my oldest son. "Mommy, there's a tarantula in my room." I sigh, rub his arm, and tell him to get in bed with Justin. Of course, I am unable to go back to sleep right away thinking of a certain spider crawling around my house. The next morning, my son tells me he was awake when he looked down beside his bed and saw what he thought was one of his stuffed animals. He reached down to grab it when it moved. He said it was big, black, and hairy. My son and his imagination will probably not step foot in his bedroom for the next year. My husband did some research that day since we wanted to make sure it wasn't a brown recluse that we saw. There is at least one good thing about living in Southern Colorado. Brown recluses are very rare here. Hoo-aw! Now I can sleep.