bugs and boys

A few weeks ago, when the weather was warming up, I found a swarm of ants in our main bathroom. We've never had them there before...in the kitchen, yes, this is Arkansas after all, and the ants will zoom in on some microscopic ice cream drip from the night before and swarm your kitchen within hours...but not the bathroom. Some investigating revealed a previously sucked-on and discarded hard candy that didn't quite make it to the bathroom trashcan. I chipped and pried it off the floor and the ants eventually left me alone.

Since then, I've been eyeballing the bathroom better, keeping an eye out for more food discards. The kids aren't supposed to throw away food in any trashcan but the kitchen one, but, well...you know how that goes. The other day I was in the bathroom and I found a saltine cracker carefully propped up in the window sill. All the kids were in bed, so I threw it away and made a mental note to question them about it. But my mental note of course got lost in my swiss-cheese pregnant brain and I forgot all about it. Until the next night, when the cracker had mysteriously returned to the windowsill. I threw it away again, again made my mental post-it, and of course promptly forgot all about it. Last night, another cracker had appeared. This time the kids were still up. I called the older ones into the bathroom for questioning. Kain admitted to leaving the cracker in the windowsill. He did it for the ants, he said. He wanted to leave them some food. In my bathroom. He left out food, on purpose, in my bathroom, for the express reason of bringing the ants back. And what's more, he just looked kind of confused when I tried to explain why this was a problem for me. Why *wouldn't* I want to feed the ants from our bathroom, after all??