The boys accompanied Haley and I on our morning walk today.  The weather was perfect, the cool before the heat of the day.  Walking with the boys, one must be prepared for all types of conversation topics and they rarely disappoint.

Flowers, Moon, and Contrail on our morning walk.

Today, much of the walk talk centered around the strength of ants.  I listened as Cody and Carter discussed what they knew about ants.  Cody spouted off facts he had learned from books and school.

cody:  Ants can carry ten times their weight! 

And then he added a bit of special Cody wisdom.  I love Cody wisdom.

cody: The queen ant, or queen termite if we were discussing termites – which we are not- are like the soul of the colony.  They are special and necessary for there to be worker ants, or any ants at all!  Without the queen – poof!- no ants.

Carter was more concerned with how many ants it would take to carry certain objects.

carter:  I think it would take seventeen ants to carry a shiny key!  And one ant could carry one whole leaf.  A whole leaf!  All by itself, momma!

The conversation got heated as they went back and forth over whether ants could carry a person.  Cody thought they could, but wasn’t sure how all those ants could get under a person.  Carter pointed out that an ant could get under his shoes by going inside the pattern on the bottom of his shoe (his shoe tread).

It was determined that it would take exactly three thousand nine hundred ninety eight ants to carry a person.

I thought about asking them for the specifics of said person, the height and weight, but the lull in conversation – the silence between topics – was a delicious delicacy I chose to savor.