Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Girlfriend's Guide to Lice Annihilation

Let's just say hypothetically that maybe there was a mom somewhere in the world that woke up to a whole new world of fighting head lice.  She was innocent at first--didn't even recognize it when the first of four started scratching....but then she got wise really quick.  Maybe a majority of the house-dwellers in her house came down with them, ok?  Said mom would within days become something of a specialist in head lice annihilation. She might even feel the urge to start a social action group against head lice and start distributing fliers about head lice annihilation best practice.  These are maybe a few things that she would put on said flier:

1.  Fifty-ish men tend not to get them.  Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
2.  Moms who spend the whole day OCD-ing over finding one more up their odds of one of the little buggers migrating to her own precious locks.
3. The first sighting of a live little squirmy thing weaving through your kids' hair is the hardest.  Make sure that if you find a little colony of them squirming around, that you show your spouse so he may feel the passion of the cause.  After this moment,  it is sheer hatred that drives you to kill them.  Onward Christian soldier.
4. Moms who find out they have "visitors" in their own scalps after fighting it all day on the heads of their little ones can get a bit cranky.  A lot cranky. Pick through her hair super gently and act like you know what you are doing, even if it is just to humor her.
5. Killing the bugs themselves is easy.  Pinch, gently remove from scalp, then smoosh into oblivion.  Or, you can just kill them with your shampoo poison stuff and then pick them out.  They are just the tip of iceberg, Girl.  Hold on to your hoodie, 'cause there's more.
6. The eggs.  At first you are like, "I don't get it.  I am sure there are eggs here somewhere."  You are right.  You have been combing right past them for two days now.  Don't panic.  Just take your time and take it one fine-tooth comb swipe at a time.  That stuff you thought was dandruff?  It wasn't.  Now is a good time to go get another cup of coffee and brace yourself for a long ride.
7.  Check in the morning, every morning, for a long time.  Like two weeks.  The eggs can live 7-10 days, so even if you last saw a live one a week ago, you can still have a fresh one popping.  When you check an area that has had a large cache of eggs, you want to go nice and slow through there, and wait to see if something wiggles.  Ick.  But true.

So there you have it.  There is so much this mom could say about head lice---for example, head lice warfare philosophies, head lice trivia, all sorts of head lice analogies for the spiritual lice that invades our souls....I am sure she has had plenty of time to think about it all as she picks more lice off of her kids than monkeys pick fleas off of each other.  But, there is only so much room on the flier.  So there.


1 comment:

Dave said...

Lice? What lice? Oh wait. I'm one of those 40ish men that don't seem to get them. My job I guess is to do the humoring.