It's A Jungle Out There!!

We love everything about living here...except the bugs. We're terrified to go play outside because, as Mike says, "our backyard is the Amazon!" and everything out there is deadly! Our neighbor has found 4 copperheads in their backyard, and we're told to watch out for brown recluse spiders. Luckily we've been able to avoid those so far. But fire ants are everywhere and being a two year old, Elaina and her friends think it's fun to explore the ant hills. No bites yet! Here are some little creatures that we've found roaming around our back yard:

Isn't that thing CREEPY?!?! It's a spider that Mike finds in the yard almost every time he mows the lawn...and they're HUGE! So Mike was killing them with his blowgun, but we just found out that they aren't poisonous. But brown recluse are all over this area and so we'll be scared of those instead.

I opened the pantry one night to find a "not so friendly" bug looking up at me - which turned out to be a scorpion (being from Canada I had never seen one!). Thank-goodness my big brave husband came to my rescue and killed it by smashing it with a hammer. Of course he had to take a picture to document it. A couple weeks later I found a second, even bigger one in the same spot, but Mike wasn't home to do the dirty work, so I had to kill it myself. I didn't take a picture - I just wanted the deed finished!

This one isn't scary - it's a gecko. When Elaina and I are eating lunch sometimes we see them crawling outside on the window, and Elaina always points them out as "Daddy's zizzard."