This is WAR!

So our first weekend here i took my 1 year old son in the back yard to play.. cause that's one of the pluses of this place our back yard is HUGE! (the catch, no trees so in the summer we can't go out without an umbrella for fear of being disintegrated instantly. i think the ozone is thin directly above our house)

Back to the story.... I take him out and we're all playing and laughing.. you could slow motion us and we'd be a commercial for the Hallmark channel. I'm spinning with my son and got dizzy so "we all fall down" 

well i fall on my elbow to support my body and my child from crashing to our doom in the weeded ground beneath us... I let him go so i can get up and my arm hurts... I'm thinking " I didn't even fall that hard why does my arm hurt?"

I look down at said arm... It's black. (say what? I have a lovely olive/tan skin pigment) then i notice the "blackish red" thing is moving...... I scream (cause not only does it hurt like heck i've got the blobs little brother eating my arm!)

I start wiping it off and then see.. it's not a blob. It's ants. Fire ants to be exact. all over my arm. cause when i fell down, i did a pile driver straight into a ant mound that was hidden in the grass, check that weeds.

the mound i fell into didn't look like this, and neither do my weeds.

 Ant bites don't just show up and itch for a day like most bug bites.. Fire ants BITE you to hold on and then they STING you multiple times... yay.  

and those stingings form little pustules later, because your body is attacking the venom that was injected. They HURT, they ITCH and if you pop them from itching or just because.. they hurt MORE. they scar and take weeks to heal. I HATE FIRE ANTS.

That was my first encounter with them... in VA there aren't fireants... I've looked. As soon as i cross the border into NC I see mounds. It's like they know VA doesn't want them. It's weird.

See that^ starts in NC and goes down... :(

So after that i have to watch where i step. but what about my kids... Their first encounter was not soon after we were washing our cars in the grass (we have a short hose) and Mister was sitting playing with the weeds.. then he started crying.. We couldn't figure out what was wrong with him... we had just eaten lunch it wasn't that hot out he didn't seem tired. So i took him inside to change his diaper and he had bites on his upper thighs and butt. (AWW i know right!) He was like this (but younger) 

Yes this is Mister but not when he was bit

(btw, if those of you who don't know me think i actually named my child Mister, i did not. It's a nickname)

Anywho. I declared WAR! and for the past 4 years it's been an ongoing battle.. I've been smart about it like getting "ant killer" and ruthless like putting MRE chemicals on the mounds and steaming them to death, but through out my attempts they have prevailed. So I researched... and here's what i found. 

Fire ants can tunnel 6 FEET down! and they have escape routes when attacked. So when you start to poison,boil, pour gasoline and drop match. They just send the older ants who are about to die anyways to attack you and the rest migrate 3 feet over. Nice right. Well it get's better... Each mound has a queen and little mini queens that when they get old enough migrate with some of the colony to make a new mound.

I've tested the pour one mound onto another and they'll kill eachother.. didn't work. I think it's because they were all family. 

And i can't really evacuate them from my yard for long because my neighbors don't so they move out wait for the chemicals to wash away and then come back. 

I've even had them forage inside my house! What am i suppose to do about that?! 

WELL I'LL TELL YOU!

I bought a fire ant killing and repelling product (very pricey i might add) it's suppose to last for a whole season (whatever that means, hopefully one year or the summer or something) and i'm going to be launching my attack very soon. ( I need to do it the day before it rains so the chems can be activated)

Hopefully this will be the "nuke" that makes the war end and my victory over the ants an epic tale to tell.