Ant Killer

Every spring the ant invasion begins. I can tell when the ants are here because one day I will drop a nugget of something edible on the floor...scratch that; it's not me who drops food on the floor...Beck will throw something off his high chair, and I'll turn around to do something, and when I turn back, the floor under his high chair will be covered with ants. At least they are the cute little tiny brown ones. They don't bite. And they are hardly big enough to see. But I don't want them in my house. After they hit the kitchen, they show up in the closet, the bathroom...everywhere. So usually I just get one of those little Raid disks and set it under the high chair, right by the back door where they squeeze in through the gaps in the floor boards. Within a day or two, they stop coming around.

But this year I have a new weapon. Daphne. As it turns out, Daphne is absolutely fascinated by the little ants crawling all around our house outside. She likes to pick them up and "hold them" by which I mean mash them between her fingers on the way to her other palm. She tries to pet them, i.e. squish them into tiny little ant pieces. I also saw her trying a new technique today--body slamming them. Literally. She would find one on the driveway. Jump up in the air above it, and land hard on her bum, right on top of the ant. Then she would hunch way over and look under between her legs to see if she got it. "I did it!" she would yell triumphantly if she thought the speck of dirt under her was a dead ant. It probably was. Maybe several. Which means, only 264,897,112,241 ants left to go. Keep up the good work, Daphne!