Fire Ants

One of the many wonderful things about living in the great state of Texas is fire ants. I grew up in California and never experienced fire ants. We had tiny red ants and they would bite, those bites hurt and itched a tiny bit but were nothing at all compared to fire ant bites/stings. 

If you live in Texas or another place where fire ants are common you know that this is not an innocent dirt pile, this is actually a fire ant mound. You do not want to come near it, you want to kill it immediately, show no mercy, because let's be honest the fire ants won't. 

We are pretty good at treating the fire ants in our yard (well vicious actually), but it can be a bit of a problem right after it rains. So it had rained in the morning and all day the day before and Mikey was out in the yard playing and he came across a fire ant mound. He usually runs right in and tells us about the mound so we can kill them, but this time he chose not to. Instead, he went and got his diggers from the sandbox and decided to play in the fire ant mound. My guess is that this lasted about... 1 minute before the ants got him. I was in the house making dinner and he started SCREAMING. I ran outside and he had his diggers all over the fire ant mound. My guess is that he played in the ants for about 5 seconds before they got him. 

Michael got 10-20 bites on one of his arms (none anywhere else). This is what his arm looked like right after the bites. See the red welts forming... not good. 

 He insisted we cover all the bites with band aids, this was actually a good thing because he didn't scratch (as much).

 This is what the bites looked like the next morning. so painful. I think he may have learned his lesson about the fire ants.