No monuments in my honor

I haven't done such heroic things that will be remembered by millions of people but to my daughter, I am a heroine. I saved her life from a spider in her room.

Marissa has turned into a night owl this summer and I like to get to bed as early as I can. Sunday night, it was after midnight that I got to bed; it never takes me long to start snoring (yes, I admit it) after my head hits the pillow.

At 1 a.m., she came into my room and with a little girl voice said, "Mom, there's a spider in my room. And it's an ugly one, too."

She hates spiders with a passion. She didn't even have to ask me - I just knew I had to crawl out of my comfy bed and take care of it for her.

Actually, I don't really like spiders either and when I saw this one, I had a hard time with it but I did get the job done and she was so grateful. She still had the shivers and was sure that it would crawl out of its crushed up state and out of the toilet it was flushed down twice and come back to get her.

There have been many times that I have been in the kitchen and heard her scream in her room. It is a distinct scream that always alerts me that there is a spider somewhere in her view. If there is a boy in the vicinity, I usually have him go get the spider; sometimes the spider is spared its life and given a new home outside because "the spider wasn't doing anything to anyone so why should it die."

Marissa is never too thrilled that we give them a new home, believing that they will make their way back into her room and torment her.

We have a lot of garden spiders outside in the fall and they really amaze us. We don't bother them, just watch them with their unique webs. Austin has often caught flies and crickets and thrown them into the webs for the spiders. It is fun to watch as the spiders quickly roll up the insects in its sticky threads.

I also did an act of kindness for Austin yesterday that maybe I do deserve a medal for. I spent 20 minutes trying to thread a needle to make a repair in the rear of his baseball pants and then another 20 minutes to thread another needle to fix the hole in the knee of his baseball pants so that the scrape already on his knee, received from too much sliding into base, can finally heal. (Can the eyes of those needles be any smaller?)

I don't think any monuments will ever be built in my honor but I have least made my kids proud for a few days.