Head Lice: A Really, Really Good Time

I must start out with a note about my survivor's guilt: our recent brush with head lice appears to have been so mild and so, well, convenient, compared to how it has gone for some friends, that I feel ashamed even speaking about it here.

But the topic of bugs in your hair is just so darn interesting.

We received a call the other evening, a few hours after spending half of the day with some good friends at a playdate, from the mother of the other play-ee. I could tell immediately that something was wrong. The mom, C, sounded very upset. It seems that her daughter, one of Annemarie's best friends, had been complaining about an itchy head for several days. And like most moms, she didn't give much thought to an itchy head, which can be and usually is attributable to a thousand other things (dry winter skin comes to my mind....).

Yet on that particular day that we played, and fairly soon after we left, the itchy head topic came up again at their house, this time with an investigation of said head. And being the responsible friend she is, C was calling to let us know that we'd officially been exposed to head lice. C's poor daughter was just crawling with them, it seems, and to make it worse, she has a ton of hair, which makes treatment very difficult. And did I mention that it spread to the whole family, as the little suckers (pun intended!) are so very prone to do?

So after hearing about the terrible trouble that they'd gone to in attempting to rid their home of the bugs (the laundry -- high heat! the vaccumming -- EVERYWHERE! the constant, constant, constant, sorting through hair to see if there are more eggs, more live ones, more....ugh), I ran to the drug store to get the lice killing shampoo so that we'd have it on hand if the bad guys appeared on our scalps, too. Must head them off (ANOTHER pun intended!) at the pass.

Now I won't go into what a ripoff that lice shampoo is -- 7.00 for an amount so small that you must purchase several bottles if you have long hair -- but I will say that I almost didn't use it after a first, cursory glance through Annemarie's hair revealed nothing. I typically don't like to dip my children's heads in pesticides, after all. At least not every day.

Yet as I was about to return the stuff, I decided to take another peek. And THERE, on ANNEMARIE'S head, was a LOUSE! Don't be fooled if you've never seen one. They are not microscopic. And while they might be fast, they are also not hard to see. It was a bug so large that if it were to land on me while I was sitting outside, drinking an iced tea, I would be aware of its presence and kindly ask it to leave. Particularly if it had plans to set up shop in my hair.

So after we confirmed that Annemarie was, in fact, hosting the insect world in her fine flaxen hair, we used the shampoo, and happily I can report that we've seen no signs of any creepy crawlies. Come to think of it, we never even saw any nits, presumably because we caught it early enough.

If this topic doesn't have your head itching right now, you're a little less than human.