I made a solo library trip the other day. It was nice to be by myself for a change because I could take my time browsing. I picked up some random books that I thought the kids would enjoy. I got several on magical creatures, although I still have not found exactly what I'm looking for. I want a magical creature encyclopedia, with realistic illustrations of dryads and centaurs and things like that. Ever since we've read Harry Potter and C.S. Lewis, there's been a real interest in magical creatures. Their interest started even before that, when I got out a huge hardback book on gnomes, a book I had loved in my own childhood. I'm still looking.

I got, "A Wrinkle in Time" for myself. I own most of the other books in the series but I never owned the original for some reason.

I also got another spider book for B. It was in the same series as the book on Wolf Spiders that he enjoyed. The book is about orb weavers. B and I both love spiders and we've both been taken with a particularly pretty spider that makes a large web on our deck, one that we've determined is an orb weaver. We used a field guide to narrow it down, but the field guide doesn't include all species of course.

Anyway, when I got home, I placed the stack on books on the bench near the door. The kids found them and got very excited, more excited than I expected. B spotted the spider one and yelled, "Orb Weavers!!" I have to read it to him at some point. And they really loved the books about magical creatures.

Early this morning, I did something that I very rarely let them do, which is I let them use the computer. Computer usage leads to zombie-like behavior, horrible fighting and a bad case of the "I'm bored's". So we try to refrain from giving them computer time at this point. But I found a really great spider website. The website allows you to narrow down your search by state or region. So now, we can finally see which spiders have been recorded in our state. B was thrilled.

I showed B a picture of an orb weaver that I thought was ours, but he thinks that the abdomen is a different color. We need to investigate that one a bit more. I explained how orb weavers belong to the "Araneidae" family, so he could click on the links with that family name in it to see only orb weavers. Later, he wanted to see wolf spiders. With the help of wikipedia, we found that they are in the Lycosidae family. Then, just to satisfy curiosity, we looked up jumping spiders, because we get a lot of those inside and we like those. Jumping spiders belong to the Salticidae family. I told him that I was sure that salta was "jump" in Spanish and that it would make sense since Spanish comes from Latin. Later, he wanted to know who the Pisauridae spiders were; we found that they are the family of nursery web spiders; we then read about nursery web spiders and B was really taken with how maternal they are.

Earlier, I read him the myth of Arachne. He has really enjoyed Greek and Roman mythology, ever since I recently told him some myths. I think it started when I explained why the cat is named, "Artemis". He's very keen to hear more Greek myths so that's something I have to find for him. It's hard to find Greek myths that don't have rape and things like that in them. Still, there are many that would be fine for him.