Ant Annihilation

Despite enjoying learning more about Buddhism recently in my kid’s religion book, I showed little mercy and understanding for the several ant families that I swiftly exterminated from my kitchen floor yesterday morning.  Whilst I was there on my knees with ant spray in one hand and kitchen paper in the other, my son handily pointed out any runaways that I’d missed in my ant annihilation.  He was bravely standing off the ground on his kitchen step, mind, having got well into the kitchen before we noticed the floor crawling.

I did have a fleeting concern though, about the lesson I was teaching him.  Usually I admonish him for stamping on ants in the garden (he has never seen anyone do this before, but did it to the first ant he saw after learning to walk) and putting the ladybirds ‘to sleep’.  I am abnormally brave with spiders in the house – taking them outside and grinning inanely saying things like ‘oh, silly mister spider must have got lost, off out to the garden with you’ whilst trying to stop myself convulsing with irrational fear. 

So, yes, they were in the kitchen, and I had no idea how else to stop them storming the kick boards and feasting on the crumbs that inevitably live on our kitchen floor, but I did wonder how the my son will react next time he finds one in the garden.