Our Farm

We got ambitious yesterday and decided to make a last minute ant farm.  I thought I took lots of pictures of the process...Chris digging into our front yard ant hill, the ants going everywhere (including up his pants!), the filling of the jar, David squeezing a ridiculously large dollop of honey on top, the boys sweetly holding up the finished product and smiling....but apparently I had neglected to put the memory card in my camera and then neglected to notice the warning that popped up after each photo that said there was.no.memory.card.  I'm a genius :)

Anyway, we used this tutorial that involved two jars with some holes poked in the top--it's really complicated :)  Then we dumped some worker ants and apparently some babies into said jar, added some food and closed the lid tight.

I never really got the whole ant farm thing and, as far as I can remember, I've never had one myself but this thing is amazing!  We've been watching the ladies digging furiously, making tunnels and moving what appear to be eggs all over the place--well eggs or some kind of food--we really have no idea......I do know though that all the worker ants are ladies and they only nap for a minute at a time for a total of 4.5 or so hours a day so that at any given time only 20% of a nest is resting.  I know you were dying to know that.....you're welcome.  We've been doing a lot of ant reading as of late and The Life and Times of the Ant is our current favorite and pretty much where all of my ant knowledge comes from....

Here are some replacement pics I took today of David loving on our newest pets......

You can kind of see the tunnels in this picture.......

....and here's a close up of the babies/potential food thingies.....We should probably work on our nature identification skills here.............

Well, I need to run and soak my fingers in some more lime juice--they are currently a fiery burning disaster from the jalapenos I was chopping up during naptime for our dinner.  Of course I wasn't wearing gloves--but to be fair I've never had a reaction like this before so I don't think it's entirely my fault.   Any suggestions for what to do with burning jalapeno fingers would be much appreciated.....and the next time you see me taking pictures feel free to ask if I do in fact have a memory card in my camera....apparently that's an important picture taking component.....Oh, and you should go dig up an ant hill.   Like right now :)