Ants!

A few years ago Chris's cousin moved to St. Louis.  Having grown up in California, she was not used to the midwest at all.  I asked her dad one day how she was enjoying that part of the country.  He told me that she was having a tough time with the humidity, thunderstorms, and bugs.  My response: "welcome to the midwest!"  Well Texas is not really the midwest, but we enjoy all of those same pleasantries in this part of the country as well!  Having grown up in Kansas I figured I'd pretty much "seen it all," until we moved here, and I discovered one lovely little creature that does not exist in Kansas: fire ants!

In Kansas ants are annoying little pests that are attracted to sticky food.  In Texas ants have the ability to do this:

Poor little man.  This is before the bites blistered and turned into little welts all over his body.  Jaxon actually sat directly on top of an ant hill.  It was a chilly day, so he had on long pants and a long shirt.  By the time the ants made it under all of his clothing they had crawled all over him.  He had bites in his hair, behind his ear, all over his chubby fingers and up his back.  As soon as I figured out what was going on I stripped him down to his birthday suit and got all the ants off.  I estimate that he got at least 50 bites.

After the initial burning wore off, however, he didn't seem to phased.  He never even acted like he noticed.  Thank goodness.