The Ants are Invading!!!

Twice every year it happens. When they didn't show up last fall, I thought they must've given up or...something.
I was wrong.
My tiny black friends are back.
Kylie thinks they're friends. She catches them, feeds them, and lets them crawl on her arms.
Julia screams "Bug! Bug!" and runs away.
And I kill them by the thousands.
I have become a very experienced ant exterminator. My best weapon? The dishwasher. Simply let the chocolate milk and apple juice drip from the plastic cups on the top rack and wait til supper time. Open the door and, ta-da!, thousands of ants merrily giving themselves major sugar highs, oblivious to the danger. Finish filling the dishwasher, dump in soap, close the door, and push two small buttons. Rejoice that it is so easy to kill so many tiny little creatures with no dangerous chemicals. And if you need to get rid of some frustration, smash all the escaping ants running out the steam vent they climbed into in the first place. Only problem: tiny ant body parts plastered to the inside of my cups. Hmmm... Rewash?

I've learned some valuable lessons:
-Ants can crawl into the tiny holes of a sippy cup, through the plastic thing that makes them not spill and have a apple juice pool party.
-Ants LOVE ham. Eat ham for Easter, drop a piece on the floor, and take a two hour nap. See how many you can attract.
-Ants also love monster cookies. This was the last straw! Don't mess with my chocolate!
Here's my dilemma. I need to kill enough ants to keep them out of my food. But I can't kill them all because the termite guy said the termites weren't in our house because they were having underground battles with the ants and the ants were winning. I'd rather fight over my chocolate with ants than have termites eating my walls. So I need a (dangerous-chemical free) way to kill my sugar-stealing invaders without letting in the termites or poisoning my children.
Ideas?