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How big are these mantises? A "newborn" praying mantis is tiny-- a quarter of an inch, maybe less. It would take months of eating and molting to get to a more substantial size. The female mantis lays her eggs in a brown foamy substance that hardens into a little block that is around the size of a walnut (just check google images for "praying mantis egg case") in in the spring up to a couple of hundred tiny mantids hatch, lower themselves from a "thread", and drop to the ground. If you are seeing mantises much larger than an ant, then you aren't seeing newly hatched ones-- probably last year's adults.
As a kid, they were my favorite insect-- one year in primary school I took an egg case to "show and tell" (I think I had seen the egg cases in a book, so I knew what one was when I first found one) and then the egg case had been left over the "back dash" of my grandmother's car (okay, what DID they call that "shelf" under the back window, behind the seat of old cars back when they had "deep" back windows?) and the warmth inside the car made the eggs hatch early-- baby praying mantises all over the place!
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