Ants!

Even though we do clean off R's high chair after we feed her, we don't usually pull off the entire vinyl-covered padded seat cover and wipe it all down. Today, after seeing a couple of ants on the floor and a few others crawling on her high chair, I pulled it off to find a whole mess of ants swarming around on her seat.

EW!

I immediately ripped off the entire seat cover, grabbed some Lysol kitchen spray cleaner and paper towels, and sprayed all the ants I could see, wiped them up, chased down every single ant I could find on her chair, sprayed the chair some more and wiped it down again, stared at the floor for as long as I could, looking for more ants, and scraped every crumb of food I could find out of the crevices of her seat cover, the plastic parts of her high chair, and all around the legs and wheels and base of the chair.

What an adventure.

Now we're not using the seat cover because it's too easy for food to get underneath the seat cover (even though I cleaned under it every time she ate, I didn't pull it *all the way off* and some food was always left behind, probably).

It's too much of a pain to pull the seat cover off and put it back on every time she eats, especially because she's been awfully fussy (teething, plus a cold, poor thing) and sometimes it's all we can do to get her off the chair and wiped down and brushed off, much less set her down for long enough to pull off the seat cover, clean up all the dishes from the meal, throw out the food she didn't finish, pick up the food that fell on the floor, wash the tray and cover, and put the seat cover back on.

So in the future when you see videos of her doing cute things in her high chair, it's not that we've gotten a new one. It's that the chair doesn't have it's nifty "aquarium" seat cover on it anymore.

Now, if anyone has any tips about controlling ants, we'd love to hear them. We are, of course, informing our landlords, and of course, not leaving food out. But other suggestions are most welcome!