ant invasion

We have an ant invasion.  As soon as I returned from Vancouver, where I was to celebrate my friend's beautiful wedding, we found ants in the house.  GIANT ants.  I am not kidding, I measured one of them today and it is almost three centimetres (over one inch).  They are black and scary.  I started my personal crusade against them by killing them systematically, one by one.  MrH, however, thinks that I am unnecessarily insane and that I should just let the poor suckers live their lives of toil and honest work, even if it entails tolerating big black inch-long ants crawling on the kitchen floor.  They only have a limited lifespan here in the North, and winter is sure to come again and kill them all.

Not enchanted with the idea of sharing my summer with these crawlers, I nevertheless have allowed a couple of them to live so far.  I have squished one, flushed one down the toilet, and threw the rest of the hoard out unharmed.  Since then, I am training myself not to look at them and to go about my life in peace, which is hard, because I seem to have an ant phobia.  An easy thing to explain if you look at one of these suckers.

Emma on the other hand has no such problems.  We were sitting on the kitchen floor, and she spotted an ant crawling past, grabbed it using her perfect pincer grasp, squished it a bit and put it in her mouth.  I tried really hard not to gag/hurl/yelp/shout/open-her-mouth-and-pull-out-the-disgusting-ant/ and generally did not want my daughter to react to my phobias, but rather to work out life for herself.  The ant must have tasted really good because she was quite happy to suck on it for a while.

Brrrr.
Brrrrrrrrr.
I. Cannot. Deal. With. This.

I mean really, what is it that I have such a strong response towards?  It was just a little insect, probably a kind, industrious little thing, but try as I may, I cannot shake the image of my beautiful daughter with an inch long black ant in her mouth.

'nuff said.