Spiders

I feel a great need to write down the events that transpired today.  Hopefully Future Seth will like that I am doing this instead of hating me for it...

It was 1:00 PM.  The phone rang and on the other end was a voice that no mother likes hearing:  The voice of the School Nurse. 

Our school nurse informed me that Seth was in her office because he claimed to have been bitten by a spider on the playground and his finger felt numb and hot to him.  Seth told her he was bitten by a Daddy Longlegs.  Her response?  "Well, that is good because they are not poisonous!"  His response?  "Yes they are.  They don't normally bite people but they are the most poisonous spiders alive."  Hence the call to me.

After I stopped laughing, I let the nurse know that she was indeed correct and they are not poisonous.  She told me there were no marks on his finger at all - that it was unlikely that he was bitten by anything, let alone a poisonous spider.  I asked her to give Seth an ice pack for his finger and send him back to class.  Before she did that she had Seth talk to me and I reassured him that I had just recently looked this information up (which I had) and that he was in no danger whatsoever.

Seriously, I chuckled about this for another hour until Seth got home from school - and then I was sad.  My poor son had worked himself into a small panic and was really afraid something was wrong - he was even nervous that he was going to die.  :-(  I pulled up several websites all showing the same information - Daddy Longlegs (or what we call Daddy Longlegs around here) are not venomous and don't even have the means to bite people.  Seth was skeptical until we saw that the cast from Mythbusters had tested the poison theory and they declared the myth busted - the spiders are not venomous.  It was at this point that Seth relaxed and ran outside to play.  He hasn't complained about his finger since.