Family Times - current issue
Our lives have been pretty wild recently. We’re in a transitional phase where our
family home is on the market, dad lives the week out of town and I’m having a
hard time fitting in all my client work. Making a house into a real estate fantasy
while real children live there hasn’t been easy on any of us.
So when I saw the school nurse phone number pop up on caller id, I sighed the
sigh of a burdened parent. Honestly I know I’m blessed there wasn’t a terrible
accident or exposure to a flesh eating bacteria, but what I heard stopped me cold.
“Mrs. Amundsen, you need to come get your child; she has lice.”
Now before you stop reading thinking this will never happen to you, I’ve got bad
news. Lice are more prevalent than ever. Schools right here in the Twin Cities
have temporarily closed due to outbreaks they couldn’t get under control. Sadly,
lice happens.
Driving to school (while scratching my head with one hand) I started to experience
self-doubt. What if I was too grossed out to do this? I was picturing myself in a
HAZMAT suit clumsily trying to comb through my daughter’s long hair. But when
my Belle, sitting on the nurse’s office bench, quietly whispered to me that a
classmate called her “lice girl” - it happened. That same Momma Bear emotion I
had when she was a tiny newborn flushed over me and I knew that I could do -
would do - anything for this child. I’m grateful for a little kick in the pants from
Mother Nature and a lot of help from a kind school nurse.
The first thing the nurse did was assure me that lice had NOTHING to do with
cleanliness. Apparently even when your house looks like something out of Dwell
magazine, as mine does at the moment, your kid can still get lice. She then dove
in with bare hands and schooled me on lice eggs (called nits). She taught me how
to ID them, pluck them out and then compress them between my fingernails until I
heard a most satisfying pop – the sound of victory.
Then we went shopping. I grabbed a “lice treatment system,” plunked down my
$20 and started shampooing. It wasn’t until we all had our wet heads in towels did
I read in the fine print in the instructions tucked inside the box. This product did
not actually kill lice, just merely taunted them.
Now I’ll admit to being a pretty crunchy girlfriend. We shop organic as much as we
can, we don’t put pesticides on our lawn and I try to make green choices – but at
this moment I didn’t want an earth-friendly alternative treatment, I wanted lice to
DIE! DIE! DIE! Back into the mini-van and another $20 later, we were ready for
take two.
While medicated shampoo steeped on all our heads, I set up my workstation. I
dragged out a big lamp, a kitchen chair along with paper towels, tweezers and
bobby pins at the ready. Then I popped in a movie (lice girl’s choice) and taking a
½ in. square of hair at a time, I combed it with the kit’s special comb, inspected
with a magnifying glass and then pinned it up. 140 bobby pins and over four
hours later, we were done with our first of many passes. (Even if you think you got
them all the first time, you really gotta look everyday for a week. I found a crafty
nit two days later which could have made all my effort for naught.)
I pulled out about a dozen nits and found the momma louse walking around Belle’s
scalp like a drunken sailor dazed by the toxic shampoo. Far from being
incapacitated with fear, I pounced on that louse with my tweezers and crushed her
mercilessly into a paper towel. Under my breath, I said a slew of unprintable words
along with “teach you to bite my baby” and was gratified on a very base level.
But the hair is only the half of it. I realize now we weren’t exactly living the best
practices for limiting the spread of infestation. When my husband is away, the kids
sleep with me. When he’s home, they sleep together in either of their beds.
Everything, I mean EVERYTHING needed to be laundered.
I washed 14 loads of clothes, linens, comforters, stuffed animals and towels – all
in hot water. Items I couldn’t launder, I sprayed with lice killer and put into a hot
dryer for an hour. I also wiped down couches and car seats. And some things, like
pillows, I just threw out. Lice isn’t just gross, it’s expensive too.
After this was all over, I talked to our pediatrician, Dr. Hobbs. Hobbs told me there’
re more reports of “resistant lice” coming out and he often prescribes prescription
lice shampoo to his patients. This could be because the louse is developing a
resistance to the poisons we use against them or people are just shampooing and
hoping for the best. Sadly, fighting lice is a multi-front war and no product is going
to cut it alone - no matter what the box says.
That night I finally fell into bed around 2 in the morning. I had to have the house
ready for a showing the next afternoon so I couldn’t just leave Laundry Mountain
for another day. And while I think I worked pretty hard doing all this, I thought
about the families without cars, without washers and dryers and how, with all my
advantages, this was still darn tough. It’s good to mix a little grateful into one’s self-
pity cocktail.
But on an up note, a girlfriend complimented me on my new highlights, “Oh, those
aren’t highlights, that’s just the lice shampoo stripping the color out of my hair.”
You can read about Lucie’s train wreck of an experience selling a house in a
buyer’s market at www.webdigsblog.com and clicking “seller’s diary.
