Waging war on the FIRE ANTS

Last night we had all the children in bed at 8:30 pm. When I came downstairs from putting Liam in his crib, Kurt had already set up the computer to watch a show. Finally some self indulgent Kurt and Sylvia time. I made a comment on how it would be great if every night could be like this - and then it all began....

One loud shrill scream from Mila's room, and then another, and another. "What is it?" I shouted back up at her. By this time she was making her way out of her bedroom.
"Its ants in my room, she screeched, they are everywhere". Mila does enjoy a bit of drama. I looked at Kurt as if to say
"yes, this is your department" and bellowed up to Mila that ants are nothing to scream about. He answered my look with
" What am I supposed to do with ants?"

We both trudged reluctantly up the stairs. There were exactly three ants on Mila's windowsill. Kurt caught them in a little tea cup (conveniently lying on the floor) and showed them to Mila. At this stage Julia, tired as she was, had dragged herself out of bed to join the commotion. Kurt then killed each ant -squishing them with his finger and went back downstairs. I was wondering if killing them was really necessary - especially since he had taken the time to catch them first.

I told Mila to tidy her room (so that I could SEE the floor and make sure there were not a whole lot more ants or a half eaten cookie that was attracting them) and not to get so worked up about tiny little ants and then went to join him.

Kurt was perusing the internet and had pulled up a fire ant search. As we looked at the pics of red ants with black bottoms and little pincers we realised this was our first encounter with the infamous fire ants of this part of the world. I went back upstairs and saw another three ants crawling through a crack in the caulking on the sill.

Well, Kurt ended up going to Lowes to pick up a variety of ant annihilators... I scraped away old caulking and got it ready from him to re-caulk. And held the fort with much encouragement from Mila and Julia as the ants continued to pour in.



Two and a half hours later we sat again in front of the computer and despite the hour decided to stay up and watch our show.