We didn’t make it home from the lake until nearly 2:00 in the morning, following the infamous bat incident of 2013. We were exhausted. We were cranky. We felt defeated. Thus began a week-long event of daily 6-8 hour head checks/shampoos/mousses/nit combs and round-the-clock laundry. The only saving grace during all of this chaos was when RM’s youngest randomly blurted out, “I love you” as I was treating her hair. It wasn’t the first time she had said it to me, but it might have been the sweetest. Here I was, stressed beyond belief, just praying to make it through the week, and she looked up at me with her big innocent blue eyes and said “I love you.” That made it all worth it.
During the next several days, I continued to conduct several, and by several I mean at least 200, internet searches about lice shampoos, lice life cycles, natural remedies, cleaning your home, etc. Obsess much, Christina? You betcha. When we started spotting newly-hatched lice nearly a week later, even after the second round of lice shampoo, we were at a loss. Why couldn’t we kick this??
That’s when I found www.girlsgonechild.net’s post on her family’s experience fighting lice and finding Ladibugs Elimination Kit. One word: miraculous. We haven’t seen any eggs or lice since treating. We’ve done several more rounds of the mousse just to be sure we’re in the clear, but we’ve basically declared victory at this point.
While we’ve been in the clear for almost a whole week now (that is cause for celebration!), I’ve left out the culmination of the story. There’s more?, you ask. Oh yes, my friend. You will be glad you’ve made it this far in my lengthy blog posts. After our week from H-E-double hockey sticks, it was time to take the kids back to their mom (who from here on out I will refer to as EW for “Ex-Wife”) and her boyfriend. Our biggest fear? That EW would have lice and pass it back to the kiddies, therefore making all of our countless hours and hundreds of dollars spent for naught. For this reason, I offered to check her head while we were there. She said she had done three lice shampoos “just in case,” but that no one had actually checked her head.
EW graciously agreed and as she sat down under the light said, “Well, this is humbling.” I assured her that we had all been in her position over the past two weeks, and therefore understood how she was feeling. However, I suspected that her embarrassment was less about having lice and more to do with her ex-husband’s girlfriend picking the lice out of her head. (What is it they say about Karma?) I soon found that she was INFESTED with eggs, but thankfully, no live lice. RM and I spent the next two and a half hours picking nits out of her hair, with me taking the lead and spending more QT with EW than I ever thought I would. Next we were checking her boyfriend’s hair. Let me just say, finding WHITE eggs on WHITE hair is equivalent to a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, everyone was a good sport, and we all laughed about the awkward situation in which we found ourselves. Although I can think of many things I’d rather do than shampoo my boyfriend’s ex-wife’s hair, I honestly think it was probably good for the kids to see all of us laughing together and helping each other. Sure, the set-up isn’t your average, traditional family, but this will be our normal, and right now it’s working just fine.
