Ants, ants, ants. I hate ants

We have ants. And I think it's pretty safe to say that we have hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands and thousands, of ants.

Thankfully, there are (so far) only a few dozen finding their way into the house.

We've had an ant problem for years; pretty much since we bought the house, I think. At first, we didn't really care. Terrible to say, I know, but we didn't really use our backyard very much for the first two or three summers we lived here. Because, well, it was a pretty crappy place. (Remember?) And since we didn't have kids, there wasn't much need to hang out in the backyard when we could hang out on the front deck when we had company.

So that's what we did. And we ignored the ants. Although occasionally I'd be back there and I'd see how many there were and I'd boil a couple of pots of water and kill 'em. But otherwise, I didn't care.

Then, in 2007, we started to redo our backyard, and we cared. But here's the problem: we didn't care enough (or maybe we cared too much) to use poisons and other forms of ant killers. So, we dumped boiling water, used the power washer and tried other natural ways of ridding them (all ways were found thanks to Google). No luck.

The following summer (last summer), we removed the old patio (because we had put in a new patio) and in the process, Ryan dug and dug and dug and I poured gallons of boiling water in the area all in an effort to get the ants on the surface and the ants deeper down in the tunnels.

They came back.

And two weeks ago, as I'm closing Alex's curtains at nap time I look down and see ants. Yup, they finally found a way through the cracks in the back wall and into the house.

I decided enough was enough and that afternoon, Ryan stopped at Canadian Tire and bought three different type of ant killers. (And then we bought traps for inside a few days later.) I know I've always been anti-poisons and anti-chemicals, but I don't want to have ants anymore.

So for two weeks we've been laying down liquid poison in the wall cracks they keep finding their way into and spraying Raid foam killer down into the ant hills. Over and over and over again.

And they're still coming back.

Which leads me to my opening statement...by the sheer number of ants we've probably killed off by now, I'm sure we have ants by the thousands and thousands out there.

So, I'll keep spraying the foam and squirting the poison. Unless someone has a better idea of how to get rid of them for good?