It has been close to a month and no fish has died at our house yet.
A delightful little tank, our aquarium has brought us a lot of joy and stress. We are learning about the nitrogen cycle and that we should change the water on a more regular basis, otherwise the fishies start looking a little peaked.
I have also discovered that my houseplants and hanging baskets love dirty fish water. My spider plants look like they are jacked up on steroids. Building on our success with the fish, we have also acquired a new "pet" in the house: sugar ants.
Some of you may remember that my husband is not a huge fan of the outdoors and regularly wages war with the insect world outside. We had a giant ant hill in our backyard some years ago and neither of us have really recovered.
You can imagine my total delight to discover a small a pile of wee ants beside our banister in the front room. I squashed them with my slipper and they dissolved into nothingness. I looked up to see a small handful of ants scurrying around the floor trying to escape the wrath of the shoe.
They were unsuccessful.
Feeling rather desperate to take care of the problem before my husband came home and burned down the house, I flipped the couches over and set the kids to squishing ants. It eventually seemed like we got the little buggers (pun intended) and I put the living room back together and hoped that was it.
It was not.
My mom picked up the kids from one of the last days of school and brought them back to our house to meet us after work. I received a panicked phone call from my mom asking me where all these ants were coming from. In the background of the phone call, I could hear giggling and loud thumps as the kids were taking care of business, only occasionally arguing about who got the "good" slipper or who could kill more ants.
My husband and I came home and, together with my mom, we tried to find out how the ants were getting in. We have a split level house and the ants are nowhere near a wall or a doorway - they appear to be coming out of the length of the banister. We doused the whole area with a powdery ant killer that says that it won't stain the floors and my mom went and bought a whole box of ant traps that she placed around the house, upside down.
My biggest fear is finding a leftover snack that the kids have thoughtfully left on the floor or hidden somewhere and having that little piece of compost be swarming with ants. I also worry that there are ants in the floorboards or the walls and that we are surrounded by insects that will somehow mutate and do not appreciate their brethren being squished by grade schoolers.
Then we would be a tragic newspaper headline like, "Family killed by revengeful insects," or "House eaten by bugs."
The struggle is real.
If no one hears from us in a few days, the battle has not gone well and we've burned the whole thing down for insurance money.
