Animal House

Here's free advice to determine whether or not you have enough animals in your household!

Please note: you should probably empty your bladder now because you may be about laugh yourself silly at what a genius I am.

We had an appointment tonight to get our taxes done. I had a 17-hour work day yesterday and was tired (and it's rather cold and rainy), so we decide Manny would just go and I'd keep the kids home tonight. Manny leaves, and I make the kids soup for dinner. Meghan ends up spilling hers all over the place, but hey, Honey is our live vacuum cleaner and promptly cleans the floor before I can even get near her. Having the two dogs stalking the dinner table while the kids are eating was a little much for me, so I put the two dogs in Matt's room to give us some peace.

Kids eat, we play for a while and read stories. I put Meghan down to bed and go to take care of Matt. I give myself Mom props for remembering that I need to set up the humidifier for Matt because he's got a rather nasty cold. So I get it out of Meghan's room (she's had it too) and go to set it on Matt's bookshelf. I thought I had cleared a space for it but apparently I missed something really important.......his ant farm.

Yep - I knocked the ant farm off of his bookshelf, it topples to the floor, and the top pops off. It was like an ant prison break because they just go EVERYWHERE. I have NO IDEA how many ants were in there but as far as I'm concerned, it may as well have been a million. So Matt starts crying (I'm killing his babies practically), right??

I quickly perform ant triage - forget the dead ones, keep an eye on those that seem stunned by the fall and first try to wrangle those that are crazed. Wrangling tactic #1: try to get them on a pencil and life-flight them back to the ant farm. It's pretty hard to find brown ants on brown carpet let me just say. OK - get two ants back into the ant farm. Get one more on the pencil and discover that the other two got out while i was coaxing a freaking ant onto a pencil tip......need to rethink this pencil-thing.

Genius decides that maybe I can use my fingernails to kind of scoop them up more quickly. Plus, Matt's still hysterical and Honey starts barking at the ants so I need to move fast. I try to soothe Matt and catch an ant under my fingernail at the same time. Not too easy - it turns out those ants can sting like no other and this one ant nails my finger I don't know how many times. I try really hard not to use "pretty words". Ok - finger no workie....clearly I am not an ant engineer.

So finally - a burst of genius. I think of Santa's gift to Matt....a bug I vacuum. Of course, right? So I ask Matt to find it and yes, it's in pieces and he rummages his room to find it. This is cake...this thing will suck the ants right up surely. Turns out that the term vacuum should be considered lightly. I start trying to suck up the ants, but this thing sucks so bad that just doesn't suck. So I end up driving the ants onto a piece of paper and then trap them with the nozzle of the bug vacuum, turn paper upside down, and utilize gravity to suck them into the barrel of the vacuum. I must say this was very painstaking work, but I can't give up on these ants because Matt reminds me that God loves ALL his creatures....and I just can't let him down.

it took me 45 MINUTES to wrangle 25 ants...sadly 2 went home to meet their maker. so finally get them all into the barrel of the vacuum but I can't transfer them to the ant farm because when I take the lid off they all run for the hills. I had to put the ants in the refrigerator for 10 minutes to "anesthetize" them. So we have an ant farm with 2 ants in it and the bug vacuum chillin'.........and I'm icing my finger which is still burning with frozen hash-browns. I'm starting to wonder someone needs to suck the poison out of my finger.

ugh - who EVER thought ant farms were a good idea :-(