This year, my wife and I have yet another son going into ninth grade. It's the start of high school and the beginning of serious academic study, the year when a child starts to think about what they want to be when they finally finish school. Mostly, though, it means it's time for the dreaded bug collection.

Each fall, students entering ninth grade at our school are required to submit an extensive collection of bugs, labeled, mounted and collated, as part of the science curriculum. The more intense students start in late summer, creeping around their yards like, well, creeps, launching themselves at anything that seems to have enough legs and moves. My older boys have moved on past high school, but in their time, they put off the bug collection till the very, very last minute. I remember a late night, last-minute argument a few years ago about whether we could just pull off a few legs of some insect and glue on a new head in order to make the project quota.

This year, my 14-year-old son, upholding a proud family tradition, spent the last four weeks of summer doing absolutely nothing, simply shrugging whenever we mentioned that his peers were out there getting all the good bugs.

One would think, in an old house like ours, that bug collecting would be a cinch. I've spent countless hours killing stink bugs, thousand-leggers and meal moths, so much so that every time I hear my wife or daughters scream, I simply sigh, grab a rolled up magazine and get to my feet. You'd think we could amass an entire A-plus collection just by putting out a piece of flypaper and sitting back for a few minutes. But for some reason, the bugs are never around when we need them. Up until last week, my son's collection consisted of a single ladybug in a mason jar in the freezer.

Last Tuesday night, however, as I was taking out the trash, I heard a scream coming from in the house that could only mean either a major bug sighting or a chain saw accident. I ran back inside.

On the outside of our kitchen window was a huge brown spider easily measuring two inches of creepy, crawly leg span. (This is, of course, an estimate, as there was no way anybody in our house was getting close to it with a ruler.) The spider had a brown, hairy body, and striped, brown and black furry legs and fangs that looked as if they could pierce the windowpane if he really wanted to. The web, about 2 feet across, was a work of art (unless, of course, you were the moth he was busy sinking his fangs into).

My wife and daughters were squealing like piglets who'd been dropped in a frying pan. My son, however, immediately started rummaging through the cupboards looking for a jar with a lid.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"That would be perfect for my bug collection!" he yelled over his shoulder.

"Are you crazy?" I said, yelling to be heard over the piercing screams of the assembled womenfolk. "That thing is a monster! You couldn't get it into that jar!"

"Not me," he said, holding out the jar, "You do it!"

We decided to do a little research first, Googling "Large brown with spider striped legs." What we found was scary but not useful: Photographs of huge arachnids, along with, for some reason, a huge number of pictures of what happens when you get bit by a spider and don't get it treated. (Get it treated. Please.)

Our own massive arachnid was either a relatively harmless Orb Spider, or a vicious attacking Brown Recluse, the kind that leave bites so gross that the only thing you can do, I guess, is get out a camera and show people on the Internet what used to be your arm.

In the end, we lost our nerve. My son said he wasn't sure spiders were even technically bugs, and I did what I always do with spiders: I got a large book from the book shelf, opened it wide, held it near the spider, then snapped it closed.

The good news is that you won't find any pictures on the Internet of my former arm. The bad news is that my son better get moving on the project, because I'm not sure a single ladybug is going to make the grade.

And years from now, when our oldest son comes home to relive warm memories of high school, he might not want to look on page 67 of his yearbook.

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