In which there is a long weekend, a great deal of water, and then a lot of little spiders

Lovely long end-of-summer weekend. I took Friday off to spend some time with Grayson. He wanted to go visit his old daycare center at McFarlin church, so, after lunch, we packed up a box of old toys to donate (a la Toy Story 3) and visited.

The school was in the middle of nap time, so the classrooms were all closed and quiet. But we were able to drop off the toys, and visit the room where G attended Pre-K four years ago. It was the same, but different. I could tell G had mixed feelings about it. I think he wanted it to be exactly as he remembered it. But it seems in the past four years there have been a lot of retirements, so many of the teachers he remembered were gone. The room was mostly the same, however, and he looked so tall and big compared to the 4-year-olds who came up to us to show us toys and how high they could jump. G just looked at them with a sort of bemused face, awkward and quiet.

Finally we knocked quietly on the 2-year-old room to see if Mizumi was still there, and thankfully, she was. She was Grayson's favorite teacher. A diminutive woman from Japan, who always kept her Japanese/English dictionary on hand, and somehow worked a type of magic on the kids in her care. Grayson adored her. I was grateful to her that when she stepped out of the room, she acted as if she remembered him, squealed joyfully and gathered him up into a hug, while he grinned sheepishly. He's as tall as her already. He didn't have much to say, but it turned out that Mizumi did, amazingly enough, have some memory of Grayson. In her Japanese accent, she did say she remembered he was "always such a good boy, very quiet, love books, very smart."

It was a good visit. Grayson's first experience with nostalgia and the way things can be the same, but different, from how you remember them.

Friday afternoon, before I left him with his dad, I took him to this trading card exchange shop called Kirby's World. Oh. My. Gawd. This place was Geek Central. I expected it to be a bit geeky, seeing as how it's billed as a place to trade and purchase Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh cards, and engage in "tournament play." Gack. But I also expected the clientelle to be under 15. Not so. With the exception of Grayson and myself, you'd think that one of the pre-requisites for entering the place was to be aged 20 to 30, with a quantity of greasy black hair, uniformly dark, rumpled clothing, an unhealthy skin tone, a slight paunch and an overall aspect that just screamed "I speak Klingon and live with my mom." I spent most of my time there praying that my son did not turn out like within my sightlines.

Grayson, on the other hand, was in Geek Heaven. He purchased $8 worth of Yu gi Oh and Pokemon cards... the cheap ones at 25 cents each, not the $10 or $20 cards. Seriously. Then I hustled him out of there and hoped I could engage him in some nice interior decorating classes, underwater basketweaving or interpretive dance. Anything to keep him out of that place.

For myself, I spent Saturday through this afternoon at Lake Texoma with Bob, lounging at my folks place. The weather was perfect: cool breeze, warm sun, and water at a nice temperature that's just cold enough to be refreshing at first, but warm enough to lounge in for hours. It was a most excellent way of sending off Summer.

The season has turned, however. Despite the warm days, there's a new feel to the air. The mornings are almost chilly. There's a sense of fall. I've noticed Monarch butterflies beginning to appear, traveling through Oklahoma on their long journey south. I'm ready. This weekend was a nice, last, hurrah.

Now I'm home again, trying to motivate myself to return to the world of the Responsible. Grayson's birthday is Wednesday, and I have yet to purchase all of his gifts, much less complete the requisite planning for his party at our house on Sunday. I need to look up some games or something. I've no idea what to do with a house full of 9 and 10-year-old boys.

Another momentous thing occurred over the weekend.

Perhaps I've failed to mention it, but we have a resident spider in our bathroom. Her name is Elizabeth, and she's small and brownish and lives in the folds at the bottom of the shower curtain. She builds a little ramshackle web every evening and catches flies and click-beetles and gnats. I don't bother her because she doesn't bother me. I have this sort of arrangement with most small spiders that make their home in my home. I figure they're doing me a favor by eating pesky insects, and as long as they can be counted on to keep to a limited area, as Elizabeth does, and not to build webs where I will walk into them, and never ever to turn up inside my shoes or on my pillow, they can be allowed to remain.

Well, Elizabeth created an egg sack last week. Just when Grayson's class at school is reading Charlotte's Web. So, rather than destroy it, (which, by the way, I was strongly advised against, since the little spiders, if they were close enough to being born, were guaranteed to come swarming out all over me) Grayson and I decided to put it in a jar for him to take to school.

They hatched over the weekend, and we now have a jar full of the cutest itsy teeny spiders you've ever seen.

Having read Charlotte's Web, and not having seen Elizabeth in a few days, I sort of assumed she had expired after laying her eggs. But on closer inspection of my shower curtain recently, I discovered my mistake. Not only is Elizabeth alive and well, but she has laid another, larger sack of eggs on my shower curtain. I have to wonder how many eggs the old girl has in her.

Tomorrow Grayson will take the first litter, in their jar, to school to show to his classmates. After school, the first jar will get opened and left out in the yard for the little Elizabeth's to gain their freedom. The new egg sack will get relocated directly out doors. I mean, I'm not running a home for unwed spider moms here. Too many more of these and Elizabeth herself may get her walking papers.