During a service project for the Youth in our ward, I found a very beautiful Black Widow and brought it home for our pet. She became our Vanessa. It was a large one and during the course of her stay in our home, she produced 3 egg sacks, holding 300 to 500 spiders in each one.
Vanessa was an awesome sight to watch in her stalking and catching insects. Her fights against preying mantis's were so neat to watch.
However, having something like this in our home was pretty stupid. She could wreak major havoc on my sweet children. We only had her for a few weeks and the kids came to love Vanessa.
We did talk about the dangers of these types of spiders and they came to respect her powers as well. We had many talks about Great Grandpa McArthur and his Rattlesnake episodes.
Finally, we did get rid of Vanessa in the kindest way possible. Here in the first picture, Matthew is extremely sad once we decided to "do Vanessa in". He would have kept her forever.
The Sunday before we lost our Vanessa, Christijan taught a lesson in Priesthood. He related this danger in our home to other, spiritual dangers we allow in our homes or in our lives. It was a great correlation to think about. We have loved not having t.v. or bad music in our home. It's helped tremendously in keeping the spirit in our lives. We still make mistakes and seem to have more bickering than we'd like, but we sure know that "there is One Who smiles on High, when there's love at home".
