The spider and the ...mosquito?

We were at my mom's last night for Sunday dinner. S HATES mosquito bites and all I ever hear about is how much they itch accompanied by crying. My mom always caters to her and tries to help the itch with essential oils, etc. Last night we were all talking about the bites and my mom, who lovingly often jumps to worst case senerios when it comes to her grandchildren, commented that she thought that S's bites weren't mosquito bites at all but rather spider bites. My daughter's eyes got huge as she contimplated what this may mean.

Rewind to another story. K and his friend from across the street had had a little picnic outside the other day. They left their plates outside and I completely forgot about them. On Saturday I told K to go out and get the plates. He went out, looked at the plates and promptly returned to inform me he wouldn't be touching the plates. So I headed out to get them only to find one of the plates still had chicken nuggets on it and was now covered in little spiders. I had no idea what kind they were but they looked nasty so I washed them down the garbage disposal (most were dead by now- hopefully not from the chicken nuggets).

Back to Sunday: So, I'm telling my grandpa about this and he informs me, based on my discription, these are hobo spiders. "Nasty things," he tells me. I look over to see my mothers eyes and my daughters mouth opened wide. Nice. Way to go, mom.

So we got on the internet to calm S's fears about the spider and mosquito bites and this is what we found...

This is a mosquito bite or what S's bites look like.






This is what a hobo spider bite looks like...or worse.

And this is a hobo spider. They live outside, like in gardens and common house spiders are their predators. So don't kill the jumping spiders(wolf spiders?)- take them outside to eat these nasty hobo things!

So long story short- S is safe and will live. I'm trying Chel's salt thing, though.