Or: It is very strange to have adult responsibilities

We are very proud of our home. It’s a very grown-up thing to have. It keeps the rain off of our heads, and gives us a place to contain stinky ghosts and make marshmallows.

Mom and Dad are so proud of my portrait drawing skills.

It also keeps us from living outside. This is very important, because I live in a place that’s full of bugs.* From March to November, the ground crawls and squirms. Creepy-crawlies hang from the trees and beetles zip through the air at inconvenient knee-level.
*Not Australia, though. Australians – how are you even still alive?

This does not include the gnats waiting for you to inhale them.

And they all want to come inside.

They are also much faster than I am.

But you know what? They can’t. Because our house has a secret force field.

My new doodling apparatus has a BLUE option!

Want to know our secret?

I call him Margarine. I do not need to explain myself to you.

It has taken me years to adjust to this strange forcefield. Spiders and I are, of course, natural enemies. Recently, however. our force field was endangered, because of an interloper and adult responsibilities.

You see, we have a mouse. Not a fluffy adorable pet mouse, who we would cuddle and love. A wall mouse. A mouse that scritches and scratches in our bedroom walls and wakes me from my beloved sleep. A mouse who might chew on our wires and throw our home into a electricity-free dystopia.

All wall mice obviously only have 3 feet for manueverability

So I had to call another adult* to come help us deal with the mouse in the walls.
*Because my husband is aware that given the slightest opportunity, I would adopt this wall mouse and attempt to turn him into a pet mouse.

Here in our town,* the adult responsible for saving our precious electricity is also the adult responsible for keeping homes bug free. He is the Exterminator.** Which also means that he expected to spray our house for any other pests. He proclaimed the wonderful bargain we would receive: free pest control thrown in with mouse retrieval. He listed all the pests that would never be able to infest our home or darken our doorstep.
*And also pretty much every other town ever.
**This must be said with appropriate gravitas, obviously.

But even with the promise of science and technology protecting me, I found myself making a request I never expected to make:

I actually said these words out loud to another grown human.

The Exterminator was perplexed. He asked me if I was sure. He showed me where he could spray to chase the spiders away.*
*Chase them away from being alive. I’m on to his euphemisms. 

He also looked extremely skeptical.

But I’ve been brainwashed, somehow, by the guardians of our grown-up house. I couldn’t let this man destroy our forcefield.

Guys…I couldn’t let him kill the spiders.

There are so many. I may regret this.

And now I’m a little afraid I’ve lost my mind. But if you come to visit, please do not kill our spiders. I worked very hard* to defend them.
*Meaning I talked to another adult for like, 5 minutes. Like I said: very hard.