Insey Winsey Spider

 As you may have noticed reading this blog, I have been trying recently to rediscover board games and also get Wolfie interested about them. I say recently, but I have been working on it since his last two birthdays at least. So I bought him this board game, or rather these two board games in one, Insey Winsey Spider. Because he always liked the nursery rhyme and because it's one of these educational board games that encourages numeracy. At first he didn't want to play: his mother gave him her arachnophobia. But a few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that he had started playing with his mummy. He is naturally good with numbers, so I can understand why he enjoyed it. I hope the game will also cure his and his mummy's fear of spiders.

L'araignée près de la remise

Nous avons parfois des visiteurs dans la maisons, enfin des squatteurs que je m'efforce de chasser, parce que ma femme en a une peur maladive. Je parle bien entendu des araignées. Mais il y en a une qui a décidé de tisser sa toile juste à côté de la remise. Enfin, pour être exact contre la remise. Elle est assez volumineuse et elle est plutôt jolie, je trouve, mais bon, c'est rien que moi. Il faut que je fasse attention à chaque fois que j'ouvre la porte de la remise pour ne pas l'avoir sur moi.

Hereditary arachnophibia

Little piece of family drama yesterday: I heard both my wife and Wolfie scream. There was a spider in the kitchen. Sadly I could not catch the spider, which was not very big according to my wife, as it had gone under the fridge, not to be seen again. Wolfie was shaking afterwards, we had to call his daddad to calm him down. It appears that his mother gave him a fear of spider. Thankfully, I am not arachnophobic myself, thanks to a certain aesthetic appreciation of their appearance and their work (some of them anyway). But that means I'm now the official family's spider hunter.

The Return of the Spiders

A few days ago, my wife screamed because she felt and saw a huge spider walking on the bathroom floor. I had to take it out, as my wife has a paralytic fear of spiders. It was really a strong one too, I could feel it kicking against the side of the glass and stomping the cardboard. And this was not the only eight legged squatter we've had this month, albeit it was easily the biggest one. Generally, they show up in the house in such number much later, around September or late August at the earliest. Whatever the reason for their presence, I am now this household's official spider catcher.

Wolfie and the spider

Yesterday, right after his bath, I was drying little Wolfie with a towel when he started pointing nervously behind me saying: "Daddy, daddy, spider! Look daddy, spider!" I turned around, saw nothing. I thought he saw a piece of tangled hair, which he often confuse with spiders. Wolfie hates spiders, he fears them like his mother does and gets nervous every time he sees one near him. But I told him I could see nothing. He kept saying: "Look, daddy, spider!" I still could not see anything, so he finally said, with impatience: "Daddy hold Wolfie!" A sign that he feels insecure and wants reassurance that he is safe with me. So I did hold him, he pointed again and then I saw it, a spider walking on the rug fast pace, big, black one. It disappeared. behind a bedside table and we could not find it afterwards. Moral of the story: always trust your child's judgment and eyesight when he says he sees a spider. Especially when you are not wearing your glasses.

The fear of arachnids

That was the big conversation today at work: this Daily Mail articles about spiders getting bigger. I recently blogged (in French) about some eight legged intruders that were indeed huge and decided to squat in the flat. Well, I started talking about it and others brought their own anecdotes and spiders invasion was on everybody's lips. One of my colleagues mentioned a huge spiders that crawled on her while she was showering and she said the strangest thing, so matter of factly that it was quite spooky: "Their body is mostly brains. They are thinker, and when they look at you, they are saying they know they will get you." I don't like spiders much, but not to this level of contempt. But I find arachnophobia fascinating. And this particular display of it, so developed, was even more so. Anyway, I think her vision of spider's anatomy psychology may have been all wrong, nevertheless it deserves to be a new great unknown line.