ANNOYED!!!

 

We've been attacked by ants, MILLIONS of them. The phrase, "coming out of the woodwork" directly applies to us. This picture was taken two weeks ago. Brian was out of town for the week (which is always convenient to have these type of things occur). We've had small ant infestations that were seemingly fixed on a daily basis. Nothing too bad though. Then one afternoon, I went upstairs to get Greta out of bed and played with her upstairs. I came down to the kitchen an hour later to make dinner, and this is what was all over my counters. There was a large trail heading across the front of the stove and over to the fruit bowl. It is so gross. I cleaned up all the dishes and items on the counter. When I opened the dishwasher to load dishes, there were ants crawling ALL OVER the dishes. I sprayed everything with bleach. And then we went to the mall food court for dinner. Is that pathetic when the mall food court and playspace is more sanitary than your house?

But, this isn't the worse of it. A few days later on Tuesday (the day before we left out of town), I was making zucchini bread with Ava. I opened up the cupboard to get out the hand mixer when WHAT??? Thousands of ants covered all the electrical appliances in the cupboard. It isn't like I can just douse those with a bleach mixture. I spent over two hours cleaning up the ant mess. I called an exterminator right away. They wouldn't be able to make it out until the next evening, which is when we would be gone. As I was packing and laying clothes on the bed, I noticed little black dots moving on the pillows. Yep, ants all over our bed! Where were they coming from? There was nothing we could do about it because we had to leave to catch our flight. For the whole time we were gone, I feared that we would come home to a disaster a week later, and....

It was worse than I thought! We came home late Tuesday night and walked into the kitchen. At first, we only saw thousands of ants coming out of an electric switch. They covered the counter, sink, towels, dishes, etc. The trail, once again, led around the stove and over to the fruit bowl, microwave, etc. I spent 30 minutes cleaning it all up. Then I looked down and noticed a trail of dead ants and very much alive spiders all along the floor underneath the cabinets. As I followed the trail in a circle, GASP, there was a live trail of ants coming from the wall, along the base of the cabinets, across the pathway (how we missed this I don't know), and along the pantry. I opened the pantry to what must have been millions of ants covering everything in the pantry. I started taking garbage bags and dumping all of our relatively new food (we just re bought everything when we moved in two months ago). I realized there is something more depressing than millions of ants invading your home, and that is throwing away hundreds of dollars in food!

I have now spent numerous hours cleaning and finding the most vicious way to kill ants. The exterminator came on Wednesday. I tried to be "green" about pesticides, but I am going insane either way. We were given a three hour window between 4-7pm. Of course, he arrived at 6:50pm. To spray the interior we needed to be out of the house for two hours in addition to emptying all the cupboards and moving furniture away from walls. It was the night before school started, so we told him to just spray outside. The next day we had another ant infestation under the kitchen sink. There were ants all over the upstairs too. Finally he showed up again last night, this time 10 minutes past the three hour window. I should look on the positive side that all the ants are gone, but SERIOUSLY! As if there aren't enough other problems to worry about. (The fact that our week vacation was spent vomitting from each one of us getting the flu, stressful. I got to clean up all the messes, gross and stressful. The girls both started school on Wednesday, stressful. The girls not feeling like they have friends or are fitting in, stressful. A baby that is crying unless I am holding her, stressful and annoying. I am grumpy! I think I need a REAL vacation.)