Many pets

It rained all week! Mr Pickle and I did not leave the house between Monday and Thursday evening this week. It has rained all day, every day. The water butt is overflowing so we don't need any more rain thank you very much. I have had a stinky cold all week too and Mr Pickle has been my little companion in quarantine.

On Thursday evening we went to the shopping centre because it was late night shopping and two of the big stores started their toy sales (for Christmas). Crazy but true.

Mr Pickle wants a pet and I had seen, in the toy catalogue, that one of the shops was selling an ant farm. I asked him how would he like lots of tiny six legged pets and he said 'very well' which is Pickle speak for yes please.

We purchased the ant farm and excitedly checked the weather forecast for the next day. Hooray, a big sun for Brisbane.

That evening I built the farm. It took me longer than I thought it would but it is a structure fit for a queen (ant obviously).

The next morning we built a pooter from a measuring cup, a big blob of play dough and some plastic pipe.

Mr Pickle tested the pooter in the house with some random bits on the floor and we were very pleased with its success. Armed with this, a trowel and pots we headed out into the park to find an ant nest to raid.

The instructions said we needed leaves to make leaf doors and Mr Pickle ran off to find some while I jumped up and down in the vicinity of a known ant haunt.

We then got down to the business of sucking up the new pets. Everything was going swimmingly, little black ants were flying up the pooter pipe, until one rather large green ant ran into the suck zone! Disaster! The big ant started attacking the little ants inside the collecting cup. Noooooo, think of the children, oh the humanity! We quickly opened it up and saved the pets from a painful and slow demise. We put the lid back on and decided that we had enough for our little farm.

We collected two colours of earth from the areas around the nest to make the ants feel at home and then made our way back to our home.

The next job was to fill the farm with the earth for the ants to live in. We popped the ants in the fridge to make them sleepy (to make transfer into their new home easier) and got down to work.

We layered up the earth and then flipped it over to add the ants. 'Where are the ants' I said to Mr Pickle. At that point I realised that I had left them in the fridge a bit longer than I possibly should have. They were all very still when we took them out of the fridge!

We tipped them into the hole in the front of the farm and as we sealed it up they started to move. Thankfully we hadn't bumped them off before we started.

We fed them and watched the spectacle for about three hours. In this time Mr Pickle named his ants:
Herbert Manager
Cottontail
Blackie 31
Blackie 32
Fally Number 1
Jumpy Number 2
Eaty Number 100
Sea world
Smelly
Stinky
1001

Two days later, the ants have settled in and are tunnelling around. We will keep the world posted on their progress.