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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Lice, Lice, Baby...dnnnunnnaanaanaahlaanuhnuh*

*whatever that sound is after that line...

Alright, stop, collaborate and listen.

I got this email the other day - an email I should say I was sort of already expecting.

First there was the pinkeye email from her school.

On Monday came the lice email.  Somebody in my daughter's school has the cooties.

Mmmmmmm....lice.


I immediately started googling images of lice, nits, and began to furiously scratch my head.


I've never had lice.  I do remember getting checked by the lice lady in elementary school.  It was awesome.  You'd go to the nurse's office and sit in a chair and she would take a toothpick and run it through your hair.  I remember it feeling really delightful and shivery as she carefully preened through my scalp.

Someone always ended up getting lice.

But they would NEVER TELL US who it was.

Obviously, they wanted to protect the Unclean one from horrible harassment.

I asked my husband if he ever had lice and he said, "Yes, as a kid, me and my sister both did."

"Did it itch?"

"Not really.  I just remember my mom going through our hair and picking out each nit. It took forever."

And right then I finally understood the term "nit-picker".  It only took me 38 years.  I'm sorta slow.

So that night I took a high powered flashlight and combed through Sena's hair.  I didn't find anything, but I decided that the next day we would go get special lice repeller shampoo and spray.



This is a product I heard great reviews on - made right here in Minnesota and it is all natural and smells good, too.  Very minty.  Apparently lice hate the smell of mint and rosemary.  So after I figured out who carried it, I went to the Minneapolis co-op near my house.

I took Sena and we wandered down the aisles until we found the beauty section and of course there was a lady in the aisle - examining some weird hippy granola products.  She was of course standing right next to the sign that screamed, "Lice control products".  I crouched down and began pulling bottles and kits out, while Sena pulled giant tubs of multi-vitamins off the shelf for further examination.

And here's what happened next.

Rich hippie lady nods at me with a smile.  I smile.  I say, "Sena, be careful."  Then I bend down and pull a big bottle of lice shampoo off the shelf.  Out of the corner of my eye, hippie lady looks at me, my lice shampoo, then my four year old (whose hair looks like it was styled by egg beaters) and then takes a giant, yet stealthy step AWAY in the other direction.  I could actually feel the breeze pull at me, that's how fast she moved away.  I knew she wanted to run and I was suddenly very conflicted.

I wanted to do two things:

1.  Explain immediately that we didn't actually HAVE lice.  Not yet.  We were just buying this as a PREVENTATIVE measure, that's all.  Nothing to be worried about.

2.  Itch at myself like a meth addict.

Number two won.  I scratched my head, then told Sena to keep her hat on, which she had already pulled off.  She looked like a toddler Medusa, wild hair sticking up all over with static.

I imagined that rich hippie lady was thinking cootie bugs might actually be jumping off us, like fleas.  I kept scratching my head and watched her try not to run out of the aisle.


I'm a horrible person.


1 comment:

Leandra Wallace said...

Lol- and I did that, literally! =) Crossing my fingers that you stay lice-free! I had it when I was a girl, contracted from my computer lab partner. And the only up side to having lice is what you mentioned, having people play around w/your hair. So nice!