Freak of Nature is here to stay

My husband and I each had our cars at church tonight, so he took the older three home with him and followed behind by a few minutes. I got home to find Mimi totally hysterical. Seems until now she has missed the fact that there is a huge spider living outside our door every night (yep, the freak of nature is a permanent resident), and she was seriously afraid it was going to come in the house and come get her. How do you even address that? Logic wasn't working (you know, the whole "It's been there for a week now and you've been fine") because she is concerned about where it goes by day and if it might have babies that would invade our house. I reminded her about Charlotte from Charlotte's Web (but even I have to say the computer generated Charlotte from the most recent movie is kind-of creepy).

Turns out this is an orb spider, sometimes called a Cross Spider because of the cross like pattern on its back. That's fitting because Mimi finally found her solace in her devotional for the night where we read from James about how God is always God, not like the shifting shadows (and other scary things that go bump in the night), and about how He chose us to be the most important out of all creation. God is so good He even answered her fears with her devotional.

I have to give you that this spider is pretty intimidating. I haven't found its exact species, but it spins a new, huge web every night, and apparently EATS the web every morning so that the proteins and nutrients in the web don't go to waste. Maybe that's why it grows so large. At this point, I think we should name it. Any suggestions? What do you think Christine...should we love it and hug it and call it George? The first picture shows the markings well, the second you can actually see it spinning, but I think you lose the detail when I uploaded it to Blogger. I wanted you to see how think the body is because it looks flat in the first photo.