Some of you may read my Twitter feed and know that we had our first bout of head lice Friday. Or so we thought. I got the dreaded phone call from the nurse Friday morning, not even 9:00 a.m. yet! Taylor had lice and needed to come home. The substitute nurse would check the other two school kids and have them ready if they needed to go home too. I arrived and collected both big girls. The nurse said Taylor had nits and I thought she said Madeleine had active bugs. Shivers and instant head-scratching from me. I took the three pages of instructions and headed to the drugstore. Despite the suggestion to avoid the medicated treatments I headed straight for the Rid or whatever. I have six kids and a lot of laundry and pillows and so on, all waiting to host a pest. I was not taking chances. I also bought a bottle of olive oil.
So we get home and slather the stuff on their hair. I tell the girls to bag up all the stuffed animals and put them in the garage. We strip the beds and get the linens going in hot water. I comb through Madeleine's hair. We've never had lice, I only have an idea of what I am looking for thanks to the ever helpful internet. As I comb through I look for the telltale bugs and nits. I see nothing. But what do I know? I bring Taylor in her for her turn. We comb. We see nothing. Still. After a few hours break from all the combing and searching we soak their heads in olive oil and give them super fashionable shower caps. The oil stays on three hours. We comb again. Still nothing. They wash out the oil (two rounds of dish soap followed by regular shampoo). We comb again. Nothing. Oil does wonders for tangles though. I blow dry their hair. Shiny, smooth, beautiful. Maybe we should do this more often. Final comb through reveals nothing. I'm still not sure of my own ability to recognize the pest though, so a friend checks them out the next morning. No sign of the pest ever being there. Either I was super thorough on the first go-round or the nurse mistook dandruff for nits. We have still washed, combed, blown dry their hair each day. Animals are still in the garage. Hair is in pigtails and braids for the rest of the school year. I don't want to deal with the real thing, if we did in fact avoid it this time.
We were supposed to have friends over for dinner Saturday. I canceled those plans on Friday. Lice is not what you want your guests to remember about your house. I was disappointed at our change in plans. Until I wasn't. We had baseball games Saturday morning and then had lunch at the pizza place. We came home and everyone napped for two hours! Well, the big kids may have been awake but they stayed in their rooms and kept quiet. Glorious! We woke up and Travis went to do his yard work and the kids and I went outside to ride bikes and run (they rode, I ran around the sidewalks in front of our house on both sides of the street). We all came in long enough for the kids to put on bathing suits and then they ran to the backyard to play in the sprinkler. Fun! I joined them for a bit in my workout clothes. Lily found this very amusing. We ate dinner. We drove to the ice cream shop (would have walked but for the storms in the area). We came home. We weren't rushed. There was no panic cleaning for guests. We took our time and had no definite plans. It was just what we needed. Far from perfect, since we still got on each other's nerves and forgot our manners at times. But peaceful and normal and just a regular day except when it wasn't.
So maybe we didn't have lice. But we did have a forced slowdown. And we needed it. I would not choose lice or any illness as a reminder to slow down and enjoy the people right in front of me. But if that is what it took this weekend, then it was a most welcome pest (except that we didn't have it, praise God!). We learn lessons in all kinds of ways. We just have to give ourselves time to see them right in front of us.
