Making an Ant Farm

When I was younger I used to want to have my own ant farm.  I thought ants were amazing little creatures and enjoyed watching them work.  Recently, one of the boys discovered several ant nests under rocks in the flower garden and was excited.  I thought it would be fun to capture some of the ants and teach the children a few things about them. Here is what we did. 

We started with two large mouth mason jars. In order to use less dirt and encourage the ants to make their tunnels closer to the outside where they would be more visible, we put a filler in the middle. You can use a empty paper towel tube, or whatever will fit in the middle of the jar. 

The boys had fun turning over rocks looking for ants. 

After searching a bit, we found enough ants with larva to dig up and add to our jar.

The two jars after being filled with dirt and ants. I only put them in the sunshine to get this picture. It's a good idea to place them in a cool dark place. 

After about 12 hours the ants had made lots of progress and dug many visible tunnels. As much as I tried, I could not get a clear picture.  It was lots of fun watching the ants work!  We kept them for around a week and a half and then let them go outside again. I wasn't sure what species of ants we had captured, so I didn't know what exactly to feed them. The bread, honey and veggies we gave them seemed to remain untouched, so I'm assuming they ate something else. 

It's interesting to me that ants are called "exceedingly wise" in God's Word! They are worth learning about, and "considering" as the Bible also says. :)  

Thoughts

 

God Sees All, Nothing is Hidden from Him

Let all the earth fear the LORD:

 let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. -Psalm 33:8

The LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men. From the place of His habitation He looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth.   Psalm 33:13-15

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. Proverbs 15:3

For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings.   Proverbs 5:21

My Newly Organized Kitchen Cabinets

After posting about ordering some lazy Susan's and a few other things to help organize,

I finally took the time to actually tackle the chaos of the cupboards, and then took a few pictures to share. 

The Spice Cabinet 

Before picture. This cabinet is right above our stove. The top shelf is high enough that it's hard for me to reach everything, and with the lower one it was also hard to reach items that were pushed toward the back. It was a scrambled mess, and it wasn't fun trying to find a certain spice when I was cooking. 

After picture. It's nice what a difference two lazy Susan's can make! Now I can find the spice or herb I need super easily. Everything that I don't use frequently is on the top shelf. 

_______________________________________________________________________________

The Baking Cabinet 

This cabinet was a disaster, one of my sisters had tried to help me organize it awhile ago, but it quickly went back to disarray. There was no real place for anything and the measuring cups and spoons were always buried behind something.  Whenever I would try baking, the little ones would also scramble things up more trying to find chocolate chips, walnuts, sprinkles and other things to make a mess with. 

And here we are after! I'm happy about how it turned out. :) Again just a couple lazy Susan's and a under shelf basket made a difference. 

It feels great to get these two cabinets done! It may not seem like much, but it's sometimes hard for me to find time and the motivation to do things like this with all six little children around wanting to "help" getting into everything and needing me crying etc.  Anyway, I'm very happy with both cabinet results, now to tackle the bathroom cupboards. :) 

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.." Ecc. 9:10a