Whack-a-rachna!

So this moderately sized spider was building a gigantic web in one of the windows in the girls play room. We decided to do an exploration on it and see if we could identify the spider. We searched long and hard (actually we googled for about 5 minutes) and believe it may be an American house spider.

But we weren't satisfied with this sloppy identification and decided to examine it closer with my shoe.....after which we were able to definitively classify it as a dead spider.