Gift for Daddy

I came into my room the other evening to find a nice little taped up jar on my nightstand with a note under it saying, "A gift of love for my dad.  Love, Clara."  Below the text was a picture of someone screaming with a spider crawling on their head.  Clara, knowing Michael's intense dislike of anything in the Araneae order, left it there as a little joke.  She extracted a promise from me that I wouldn't let her spider go until Dad saw it.  Okay, fine.

However, the joke was on me when I woke up the next morning staring into an empty jar, fine sticky webs from my nightstand to my pillow and headboard (which got in my hair when I sat up), a nasty little bite on my side that itched and hurt all at once, and the unsettling feeling that I had been snuggling with someone besides my husband during the night....

Clara was sad her pet got away, but delighted that he'd had such a fun and productive night, "Can you believe he did all that while you were sleeping?"

This wasn't the spider Clara caught, thank goodness.  This one was so big and nasty we were all forced to leave the dinner table to watch her eat her dinner.  Yes, that is a full-sized grasshopper she has there!  Michael kept a safe distance.