TinyPants

Penelope’s gone.

She had one more batch of babies, and had recently started venturing out of her web to visit the kids, but last night she didn’t come back. I’ll wait a few more days, and if she’s still not back, I’ll vacuum up her web and let the kids move in.

Warning: The graphic images in this blog post may be disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

Readers will remember I agreed to allow Penelope (our live-in spider) to stay until I saw an egg sac. I saw one two weeks ago, and as fond as we are of Penelope, we decided to relocate it (into the garbage).

Well, those suckers hatch pretty fast, which makes for two more suckers (us) because–I love them already.

We’re probably housing more than one young family. There are teenaged spiders everywhere–chasing each other in the lamps, hitching rides on us across the apartment, finding their way into the sink so we have to save them. They rear up and try to get nasty with us, but I think Penelope’s told them about us, so they’re quite well behaved after a gentle scolding. Not everyone is afforded the same privileges as Penelope (one little spider suffered a drastic reduction of his living space yesterday as I was vacuuming), but since we haven’t been bitten yet, we’re pretty lenient with the little guys. We think our apartment has been a spider sanctuary the entire time (3 years) we’ve been living in this old (built 1916) apartment, which actually makes me feel better about my cleaning habits knowing they are in fact abandoned spider webs and not huge strands of dust.

I know what you’re thinking–she’s in a for a disappointment. She’s obviously not read Charlotte’s Web!! Penelope can’t be long for this world.

In fact, I have. And while Penelope may not be as spry as she once was, she is thriving. And has two empty sacs up there, so she’s made these puppies before.

Penelope vs. Ant (days after the big hatching)