Get ready for a 4 letter word that makes every parent cringe. LICE! Yep. We had it! A week into the school year and there it was, creeping in on our house. We found out that one of the amigos had lice. I cried. A lot. I didn’t even know where to start. So naturally, I Googled. I Googled until my brain could no longer retain information on lice. I was so disgusted. But knew that having 3 kids, it was bound to happen someday. We’ve had hand foot and mouth disease twice, and strep takes us all out one by one pretty much every winter. So with our luck, it was almost a given that we were gonna get hit with it at some point.
When I say that lice is a pain in the ass, I mean that to the most extreme extent! I was doing loads of laundry for daaaaaays. All in hot water and dried at the hottest temp our dryer could crank out. On top of the laundry situation, we had to treat not just patient zero but the entire family. Even though only one of us had the little buggers, I was not about to let those things spread. Room by room things were mopped, wiped, vacuumed, sprayed, thrown away, quarantined in garbage bags, and then some. I’d be damned if these things were going to stay with us for longer than a few days. We all sat in the plastic white computer chair getting shampooed with the smelly pesticide, then combed through and through, pulling a quarter of our hair out of our heads with every swipe. Every pillow in the house was tossed, hair brushes were in the trash and haircuts were forced. I’m sure I overdid it and I didn’t care how much was going to be spent on the remediation, I was going to do EVERYTHING Google told me to.
We had a whole weekend planned with fun activities but ended up sitting our butts in the house and quarantined to our backyard. Not wanting to spread it to anyone of course. It still wasn’t over after that boring weekend. Every morning and evening for 10 days, there we were, lining up to sit in that plastic white computer chair to be checked. Making absolute sure there weren’t any remnants of the pesky brats. Then once that 10 day mark hit, we all had to be retreated. More hair being pulled out from that fine tooth comb, and another day of airing out the house of the pesticide fumes.
There are two things that I have personally experienced that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, salmonella (maybe I’ll get into this in another post) and lice. I laugh about them now but hell, I was not laughing when we were going through it. Both contagious, both made their way into the house, and both wreaked absolute havoc on us. Those 10 days, are 10 days that we will never forget!
xo
Cass
five by five 