Snakes

I am teaching this week for Miles's preschool class and our theme is Reptiles.  I wanted to find a reptile for them to touch and hold so I asked some of our old neighbors from Riverdale if we could borrow a few of their snakes.  (When Tess was in Joyschool, this same family brought their snakes for Reptile Week, and they were pretty amazing.  They have 5 boys, so snakes are the pet of choice in their house.  I don't know how many they have, but I know it's a lot and some of them are big.  Huge.  Like 7 feet long.  !! )

I asked to borrow little ones for our preschool...I am not really afraid of snakes, but I think I might be freaked out having a 7-footer in our house overnight.  Anyway, Bryan picked them up and brought them home after work last night, and  set them on the end table in the family room.  Right after dinner Tess ran over and said, "Hey--I only see one snake in here."  (We picked up two.)  We laughed and said, "Yeah, Tess, good joke."  But she said she was serious so Bryan went over...sure enough, this guy was alone:

Bryan, somewhat jokingly, said "I bet he went behind the piano--just 'cause that's the hugest, heaviest, hardest thing to move."  Well, of course he was right.  After looking all around our bedroom and family room, we finally found him behind the piano.

Hmmm...how the heck to get him out?  Our piano is over a hundred years old and it is SO heavy.  Plus, one of the wheels in the back is broken off so we prop it up on a piece of 2x4.  We were really nervous that if we tried to slide the piano at all, it would come off the 2x4 and would crush the snake.  We would have felt terrible if we killed our friends' snake less than an hour after they let us take it!

So Bryan ended up lifting one side of the piano while I shoved a few 2x4s under it, just so we could get a better look.

Every once in a while he would peek his head out, just for a second, and then pull right back under the piano.

"Hey buddy!"

We didn't know how to coax him out.  He was certainly happy in the nice dark under the piano.  Bryan got a dowel and slid it up next to him and kind of "swept" him out, very slowly.

"Welcome back, little guy."

Ahhhh, glad to see the 2 snakes together again!

Here we are this morning, before Tess had to go to school.  (I put their cage in the bathtub, because I figured that even if they did get out of the cage, they wouldn't be able to slither up the slippery edges of the tub.  But they didn't escape again.)

Here we are at school.  The kids all thought that the snakes were super cool.

For other Terry creature adventures, go here:  http://bamatamb.blogspot.com/2010/04/surprise.html 

or here:  http://bamatamb.blogspot.com/2010/10/hes-baaa-aaack.html