Boy, was I wrong.
I mean, what was I thinking? Where did that “not so hard” thought even come from?
Here’s how it went. Right in the middle of introducing Rosa to my father, she flicked some of her stomach hair right in his face.
And she didn’t even wait for dinner to crawl out of her plastic tank.
No, she made her first appearance the next morning on the breakfast table, when she strolled out from behind the toaster, sending my mom shooting out of her shoes, down the hall, into her bedroom, and locking herself in her bathroom, putting a towel under the crack of the door to make sure Rosa didn’t come in.
After my mom disappeared, Emily came in for breakfast, wearing Katherine on her shoulder. Old Kathy was just perched up there like always, checking out the breakfast table with her beady eyes to see whether she wanted to flick her tongue at some toast or try to lasso in an orange slice. That’s when she spied Rosa, kicking back on a slice of toast. Her beady eyes got really big, and she started to hiss like a leaky tire. But Rosa didn’t back down an inch. She started to pulsate up and down on that toast, and even let out a little hiss herself. When Katherine saw that, I thought we were going to have to send Katherine to the Hospital for Freaked-Out Iguanas. She just put her tail between her legs and curled up into a scaly little ball. Oh man, that was fun to see.
And even though I had warned Rosa about not scaring Cheerio, she found it necessary to attach herself to his tail, so when he chased it, he got a good look at her and it scared the daylights out of him. He kept changing the direction of his circles, but everywhere he went, there she was on his tail. It was like she was on a great old-time roller coaster having her own personal amusement park ride, right in our kitchen.
Before breakfast was even over, I had already made a list of all the many ways having a baby in the house, even if it’s a baby tarantula, can totally mess things up.