Ants

For the past two days I have been competing for my kitchen with ants. When I first noticed them I was a bit offended. "Ah, I keep my kitchen clean. So clean that I don't even like a full fridge because I feel like it's too cluttered. Why are these ants here?!" Three days ago it started raining and didn't stop for two days straight. I think that's the reason these . . . ants have invaded. I want them to go away. They drive me nuts!

I have found something that kills them immediately, though: Windex. I spray them, wipe them up and toss them out. But it's not a long-term solution. The pest control guys are coming Tuesday so I've just got keep them under control until then. I do my best to keep all crumbs and spills cleaned up. Henry's a good watchman, too. He has seen my distaste for them and so as soon as he sees them he comes running to me and points to the kitchen talking gibberish. I know he has found an ant.

Todd's been a big help, too. Today he has cleared the kitchen floor of ants twice. He laughs when I say, "Ewww. There are just so many!" To me, seeing about 100 ants a day in my kitchen is a lot, but in Todd's fatherly way he says something like,

"When I was in India we had trails of ants all over. I would wake up in the morning and my peanut-butter jar would be perfectly cleaned out! You know how we can't even scrape our peanut-butter jar clean? Well, they did. That's how many we had."

And that makes me feel so much better.

I stay calm though. This situation reminds me of a book I used to read as a kid. It's about a duck that made a hole in his wall trying to find an ant, with no luck he continued to tear down his house, pipe by pipe and wall by wall, and eventually ended up sitting on a pile of rubble as the ant walks away unscathed. Well, I sure don't want that to happen. So I keep cool. But, it sparked my curiosity, what ever happened to that book? What was it called?

I could not remember but with Todd's Internet skills he helped me find it it online and low and behold it's called, "Henry's Awful Mistake". Henry's the duck. We then fell upon other books by Robert M.Quackenbush such as, "Henry's Important Date", "Henry Babysits", and "Henry Goes West". I was completely surprised by the coincidence and even a little happy that the trouble with the ants brought me to these books.