Lice is a chronic issue in the school and I can understand why. Most lice today are immune to the pesticides that were used back in the 70's when I was a kid. Now to get rid of lice, you have to use an olive oil based product to comb through the hair, then pick the eggs and babies out of the hair every day for 21 days until there are no more. If you don't keep pulling them out, they'll eventually grow up to be adult, re-produce, and you're right back where you started.
On a related note, I don't know why lice haven't died off as a species from all the inbreeding. Brothers and sisters copulating, every time they have babies? Gross.
These photos are from the day before we discovered lice on Marissa. We had gone to the Fulton Festival, where one of the fundraising activities was a hair coloring station.
Marissa had begun scratching her head that morning. I had been checking her head for lice since notes had been going home all week about lice, but never saw anything. I should've known better to think I could recognize them with the naked eye, despite my prior experience in ridding our house of lice.
She ran into a couple of good friends she hadn't seen in a while and wanted to have a playdate with them the next day. So Sunday morning I informed her that I wouldn't even call the parents to set up a playdate until she let me comb through her hair and check her over.
And that's when I found the little critters.
Marissa does not like to have her hair combed. At all. Usually it is a matted, tangled mess. I figure that as she gets older she's going to care about her hair, so that's a battle I'm not willing to have right now. Until it comes to ridding her head of lice.
Once she realized she didn't have a choice but to let me comb through her hair, she was amazingly patient. We set up a lice-killing station and went to work for over an hour, combing through every piece of her hair with the best lice comb ever, nit free.
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| Worth every penny. Accept no substitutes. |
I checked Lindsey -- nothing. I checked myself -- yep, critters. Makes sense since Marissa is often snuggling in our bed, usually on my pillow.
Having been through this before, I knew to inform Marissa's friends' parents so they could check their own kids. One parent found lice on both her kids, and I went to her house and helped clean both of them up. But then the following weekend Marissa went to a sleepover and came home with an adult louse on her head. Since I'd been combing through her hair every day, I knew it wasn't an adult I had missed, she must've gotten it from someone else. I communicated with the parents of the kids at the sleepover, and sure enough, one little girl had it and they hadn't known it. No itching, no scratching, no symptoms until they checked her and found out. Little stinkers.
It's been a week now that I have NOT found adult lice on her head, which means that other kids have stopped transferring them to her. So hopefully we'll have this second episode of lice behind us soon. I have continued to check Lindsey and she remains lice free.
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| Marissa after a day of de-lousing and combing. |
Surprisingly, Marissa hair looked about two shades lighter after a day of treatment, combing and two shampoos. Hmmm, maybe we should be washing her hair more often, you think? On a good note, Marissa is good about combing her hair every day now, and loves to have me put it in pigtails in the morning (to keep it up and away from possibly touching other kids).
Humans: 2. Lice: 0.
Beat it, suckers.
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