Would you Like that With or Without Ants?

Oddly enough, this is one of the most common questions asked in our house these days.

Mostly the ants are little, tiny, ghostly looking things about the size of flake of black pepper that get into everything.  Only problem is, they seem to spawn at the rate of about three million per second; the entire population of China throughout history has nothing on these ants.  Someone left the remains of a PB&J in the guest bathroom the other day, and when "ants" were reported, I went to investigate.  I followed a solid trail of these ghost ants across the bathroom cabinet, up the wall, through the window (which leads, oddly enough, into our laundry room) across the wall, over the door, across another window sill (between our laundry room and "maid's quarters," known in our house as "the storage room") up and over the top of a ten foot wide cabinet, and up the TWO STOREY wall that is the west wall of my laundry room.  And from the top of that wall, they presumably formed a solid and equally tortuous trail two stories down to the ground.  This was a  Solid Chain of Ants, two or three ants wide, stretching this vast, (for ants) cosmological distance.  That's a lot of ants.

I sprayed them, of course.  All that I could reach.  With some wonderful, non-toxic, mint-based spray that my husband found and that makes ants curl up and die, twitching, in their tracks.  DIE YOU FILTHY LITTLE VERMIN, DIE!!!!  MUWAHAHAHAHA!!!!

But I digress.

Then there was the day that Timothy asked for honey on toast.  There seemed to be an odd, frothy mixture embedded in the honey.  Oh, no, that's ants.  Millions of them.  Were there more ants or honey?  An intensely philosophical question that I didn't care to answer.

"Would you like your honey with or without ants?"  I asked him, and when he was informed that it was with ants or not at all, he cheerfully agreed to "with ants."  And then proceeded to eat every bite of his toast.  This is the child who vomits when you wave a carrot in front of his face and can't stand horrible things like Chocolate Ice Cream because they're just too far off his "normal food meter."  I don't get it.

And, since we've been taking a Lot of Very Nasty Medicine lately, I have fallen back on the immortal wisdom of Mary Poppins that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and have been offering same as a bribe to get the nastiest stuff down their throats.  And again the question comes:  "Would you like your sugar with or without ants?"  Always they ask for "without," but none of us looks too closely, because we know the truth.  The ghost ants have gotten into my large sugar canister and carved out tunnels in the sugar there; they've gotten into my bread box before and turned the remains of a loaf of bread into an ant hill.  I didn't have any other bread, so I whacked them out the best I could on the counter top, sliced it, and turned it into a PB&J for Timothy's lunch at school.  I told him they were all gone and hoped the ice pack I put in his lunch box would slow them down enough that we could maintain the polite fiction surrounding what we both know is a bald-faced lie.  Jonathan occasionally makes matter-of-fact comments to the effect that "they're just extra protein."  Oddly, this seems to reassure all three children.

And then, we have a roving group of LA-style gang ants; black, nearly a half-inch long (OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a LITTLE bit, but they're much bigger than any ants should ever be), and I strongly suspect they're the kind that bit Timothy's finger the other day and made him bleed.  They've staked out the territory between the guest bathroom and the bathroom in the abuela's room (which we use as a TV room/play room) and roam in small packs of 3-5 ants.  They're never in groups big enough that I can spray (or stomp or hammer) enough to make a difference or tell where they're coming from.  Sometimes we stomp, sometimes we just give them a wide berth and they return the favor.

There are many more tales I could tell you over a cup of coffee, if you'd care to join me?  And would you like your sugar with or without ants?