The Spider Whisperer

Carter has been into bugs this summer, like I mentioned in the Summer entry. He's also been obsessed with spiders--black widows mainly--finding them in their webs, then feeding them grasshoppers. Well, my friend across the street, who is also Carter's primary teacher, called him for a ginormous favor: Would he come over and get a black widow off of her ceiling? She would supply the jar and ladder. When I asked him, he immediately responded with major enthusiasm. Once on the ladder, the excitement turned into fear, but nothing was going to stop him. He was shaking so bad but he wanted to get it. It was challanging because the spider kept going into the corner so the round openning in the jar made it hard to trap it. He agitated it with a skewer so it started crawling down the wall--we were screaming, Carter on the top rung of a ladder, shaking and yelling out in fear but he got the jar on it. Mission accomplished! He shook for about 10 minutes, but was so excited and proud. He thanked Jen and went home to work on his plan for the black widow. Now he had a speciman in a jar for close up spider/grasshopper and spider/katydid wars. I'll post a photo as soon as Jen downloads it.