The Hard Way

Isaac got an ant farm for Christmas. We ordered the ants then, but they couldn't ship them until the weather was warmer. The ants were finally shipped and we received them this week. They actually came on Saturday, but I didn't get the mail until Monday. When I opened them up, they all looked like they had died. The boys were upset and I was mad at myself for not checking the mail. It has been still getting so cold out at night that I was sure that they were dead. We went to school and a I reassured them that we would order some more and we wouldn't have to wait so long now that the weather was (kind of) warm.

After lunch, I got a call from the school saying I had to come get Eli because it looked like he had pink eye. When I got into the van, what do you know...the ants had woken up! It must have warmed up enough that they were back to life.

Eli was so bummed that he was missing school. His eyes filled up with tears and he was sad that he was going to miss outside recess. To cheer him  up, I showed him the ants and told him we would put them in the ant farm when we got home. We were both pretty excited.

Not even reading the directions, we opened up the ant farm and dumped them in. Before I could get the lid on, we had ants crawling EVERYWHERE trying to escape. I couldn't get the lid on without smashing them. By the time we would get one back in, we had five more escaping down the side. Eli thought this was the funniest thing in the world! I was so grossed out. He was picking the ants up off the black counter top as I was trying to push the others back in. It was a disaster!

After we finally got them in and the lid on, I looked at the directions. We learned the hard way that you are supposed to put them in the fridge for 15 minutes to "SLOW THEM DOWN". Yeah, that would have helped! And that also explains why they looked dead in the morning. They were cold and SLOW! Next time we'll read the directions.