O Ant, Where is Thy Sting? Ugh,There It Is.

On Saturday Amelia and I enjoyed working out on our lawn for the first time (beyond mowing, that is). We pulled a lot of weeds and did a little trimming of hedges. It was surprisingly fun. Much more exciting than working on my parents' garden as a teenager. Maybe ownership has something to do with it.

As we were working, Amelia grabbed what she thought was a prickly weed of some sort, perhaps a stinging nettle. She went in washed her hands, and then went back on to just yank the thing out. Turns out, however, that it wasn't a nettle at all. It was a colony of fire ants.

With somewhere around 20 bites on her right hand, she was uncomfortable, but not too bad on Saturday. On Sunday morning, however, her hand had swollen up quite a bit. She iced it and continued to use Cortizone cream and taking ibuprofen to deal with the stinging. By Sunday evening it looked like this:

Not fun! Today she went to the doctor who told her she was having an allergic reaction. He gave her a steroid shot and put her on steroids and antibiotics to clear it up.

I feel terrible. We'd just been talking the day before about how she has a bit of a dramatic streak and sometimes made things out to be worse than they actually are. So I'll day Saturday I'm like "It seems like it's progressing normally." And then her hand swells up like a baseball glove.

Well, I guess this means it's time to call the Orkin man.