unwanted excitement

Some of you already know about our unwanted visitor this week from Ben's facebook updates. If so, sorry for the repeated story, but holy cow! Look at this thing!!

We stepped outside on Wednesday evening to go for a walk and were met with a 4.5 feet long snake in our driveway. Normally I don't like snakes, but I'm not terrified of them. But this being so big, so unexpected, and so close to our front door freaked me out a bit. It was also the second snake we had seen on our property in three days.

We watched from a distance for a while, but after twenty minutes or so the snake began to move closer to us rather than farther away. He kept trying to get under the garage door and I was not going for that! After unsuccessfully trying to think of a better solution, Ben killed the snake with one strike of a shovel.

As unwanted as the snake was, it was really sad to see him die. We talked with the kids about respecting animals and sharing the Earth with them. We made sure that they understood that it was sad to harm any animal (though I have to admit I felt like a huge hypocrite through the entire conversation and was just waiting for the onslaught of questioning that I feared was coming from Luke- eating meat, hunting, killing bugs, etc.). All in all, it was just a pretty depressing evening.

We have a landscaping company coming this weekend to take a look at our unbelievably overgrown forest of a backyard. I am hoping that once our yard is cleaned out a bit, we will stop seeing snakes.