it all started with spiders

Being a stay-at-home mama with a handy dandy grandma two doors down affords me the opportunity to go to my daughter's classroom to Help With Centers.

For those of you who don't know what Centers are, Centers is a time of the day in Kindergarten when the class splits up into groups and does fun little activities on a rotating basis. Today, the theme was SPIDERS!!!! Ooooohhhhh, yuck, scary, slimy, gross, Ihatespiders, spiderseatyou, et cetera.

I? Happen to like spiders. They eat the bugs that bite us. I find that to be useful. Not so useful is when the spiders bite us, and then I kill them. That's just my policy.

I read each group a little nonfiction work about spiders, and we all learned a lot of useful information. For example, spiders have eight eyes that don't work well. Also, they hear through holes in their legs. For realz. I can't make this stuff up. There was also some information about tasting with their hairy legs, and that is way weird, because I pretty much can't do anything with my hairy legs, and that includes wearing pants. Because it just feels weird, that's why, and also, have you ever seen hairy legs under stockings? EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWW.

Or maybe they taste and hear with their hair? And smell through holes in their legs? Spiders are terribly confusing. That's in the book, too.

Also eeewww? Spiders the size of dinner plates. That is a little bit of yuck. There is no need for me to love HUGE-ASS PLATE-SIZED SPIDERS, because I have no huge-ass insects. Not even a huge-abdomen insect. I just need the spiders to eat the mosquitos and gnats and black flies. More eeewww? The picture of the wolf spider that carries her babies, all ninety gazillion of them, on her back. I didn't need to see that before I had my coffee, thankyouverymuch. The teacher could have warned me I'd be seeing graphic images and would need to be properly caffeinated in order to deal. Alas and alack.

After we had become learned, we constructed some little spiders out of styrofoam that had been conveniently pre-spray-painted black. There was lots of poking, and skewering with toothpicks, and insertion of pipe cleaners (real classy folk call them chenille stems, and by real classy, I mean, If you're in JoAnn Fabrics, and can't find the pipe cleaners, ask for chenille stems. They'll point you in the right direction when you speak their language.)

At one point, during the second group, I had to get on up, out of my mini-chair, to fetch something essential to spider-making. I walked around the mini-table, and was completely shocked to feel (and hear, mind you) A MINI-HAND REACH OUT AND SLAP MY BUTT. THE MINI-HAND ALSO GAVE A SQUEEZE.

I spun around faster than a tornado (to my credit, I did manage to stop at 180 degrees), caught my own eyes as they popped out of my head, and returned them to their original place. Little Mr. A was smiling at me.

I touched your butt, he said, rather pleased with himself.

This caused my bug-eyes to narrow into the evil, I-Could-Cause-Permanent-Harm-To-You look. Leaning over just enough to appear as threatening as possible, I said, And you will never, EVER touch my butt again. You will not touch ANYBODY'S butt. It is ALWAYS THE WRONG THING to touch other people like that.

I think I terrified him. I hope so. Little handsy boys can turn into big handsy men. And it's a good thing he didn't put his littly handsies on my daughter.

After school, we were up the street at Miss O's BFF's house. BFF had promised O that if she came over to play at BFF's house, they would sit in front of the fireplace and drink hot chocolate with marshmallows because it had snowed. Too bad BFF's mommy didn't know about that...Miss O said some less-than-choice words to her BFF about making promises she couldn't keep, and forecasted the long-term outlook on their relationship if BFF continued to lure her in that way.

We were all talking about our day, The Mister, me, BFF's mom and dad, so I thought I'd share the story of Little Mr. A playing grabass with me.

I need to go over to his house? The Mister asked in his Big Man Voice.

Dude. It's Little Mr. A. His house burned down three weeks ago. He has no house.

Yeah. Right. I need to go over to his grandma's house?

(Here is where I just looked at him, contemplating all of the things I could say that would make the situation even better blog fodder than it already was.) I am TOTALLY blogging this conversation.

Yeah? Well, I had to stop fixing things at the hospital today to move a dead guy before lunch.

SERIOUSLY? BFF's mama chimed in. I have a cousin who used to retrieve dead people. One time he had to go pick up a guy who had donated his bones to science. Only the bones. So he had to go pick up EVERYTHING ELSE. It was in a bag.

So that, my friends, was my day. I learned about spiders, had my pooper grabbed by a five year-old, and got to talk about dead people parts in big ziplock baggies.