Project 52 {week twenty} - The snake story

I know I posted Nicholas' finding on FB, but I've been asked a lot about the details, so I thought I'd also post here.

We were getting ready for our day...I had a photo shoot and then planned to take the kids to a birthday party for Lois. Nicholas usually makes a cute little birthday card, so we went downstairs to get some scrapbooking supplies and to be honest, my crafty space is a bit of a disaster area. There are a lot of bags of yarn and other supplies from various projects that I haven't bothered to put away. Ok...getting side tracked. Anyways, the point is that to say that it's a bit messy is an understatement. So, we're downstairs getting some paper and some punches and stuff and Nicholas said "Why is there a snake?"

I said "It's not a snake, it's probably just some yarn"

Nicholas was uber calm and said "No, mommy, it's a snake and it's moving"

Thankfully, he was calm, so I stayed calm and just told him to go upstairs and get daddy and then I proceeded to start moving things to make it easier to get him out. As I was clearing the area, I could hear Nicholas yelling to Mike to come down and get the snake. Then I heard Mike say it isn't a real snake and Nicholas assure him that it was, in fact a REAL snake. To which Mike replied "Nicholas, if there were a real snake down there, then mommy would also be up here screaming". HA...what little faith he has, LOL...but he's probably to my reacting to spiders, so he just assumed snakes would also freak me out. Nope...it's a leg thing...I don't like creatures with more legs than I have...snakes have NO legs, therefore...totally not scary. =) Getting sidetracked again....So...Mike came down, excised the uber strong snake from my mesh target cube storage racks and put him in a mesh trash can. Then, like the proper photographer and geek that I am, I grabbed my camera and went to work on Wikipedia for an identification. Our little visitor turned out to be a bull snake...not venomous and actually keeps the mouse popuulation down, so we let him loose in field behind the house. I took the kids and went to the birthday party and a bit later, the visitor decided to make himself comfortable in the middle of the yard...ok...I'm completely good with him hunting mice in the field, but, I kinda don't want him in the yard since the kids were very interested in him and Claire is tiny enough that he could swallow her whole....so Mike picked him up again and took him a bit closer to the reservoir.

So....now, the pics....Don't scroll down if you don't want to see them. Consider this your fair warning and I've certainly included plenty of text to prevent the shock of close up pics of the snake...so again...if you don't like snakes...DON'T look =)