Thursday, March 29, 2012

How To Be A Lousy Parent.....

Lousy as in dealing with a Louse - actually in dealing with quite a number of them....

Lousy as in, Leah waking up at about 6 am this morning saying "Mommy my head itches".

This caused Tash to check her head and low and behold, some signs of lice were detected.

This caused much non-rejoicing, and the whole house being awakened.

It then including a dash to an open pharmacy for purchase of effective delousing materials and a full decontamination of the child in question and of the house that is still going on.

On checking it looks like Leah did a very smart thing in telling us quickly as there were only a relative few present. Smart Kid. She must have caught them quite recently.

Amazingly, no one else in the house has shown any signs of the infestation after being carefully checked so it was caught very early.

However, even though we don't have any unwelcome scalp tenants, Natasha and I have both developed some really impressive psychosomatic itches and desires to scratch our heads now.

We've applied the removal shampoo to Leah's head, combed all of her hair through with a nit comb and killed off the colony as far as we can tell upon very close observation.

So we've been washing the sheets with a sanitary setting on the washer, which takes hours, boiling all hair brushes in the house and quarantining all non-washable items.

I'm now working from home this afternoon to cover as Leah is staying home from school today. In between working I'm shoveling loads into the washer, vacuuming the carpets and spraying all non-washable fabric surfaces. Fun.

So far PETL (People for the Ethical Treatment of Lice) have yet to show up at our door to complain about the multiple summary executions by chemical warfare of the lice. This is just as well as I'm in no mood for a lousy bunch of moralizing idiots right now.

Ah, kids, how very, very, many experiences we would miss without them.

3 comments:

ProudHillbilly said...

Let the school know - that's most likely where they came from. We went round and round with them at one point. Come home from work, everybody scrub head with nasty shampoo, bedding decontaminated, toys bagged up. Then dumb teacher goes down the line of kids waiting to get school pic taken combing their hair. Using same comb each time. They finally closed the school and steam cleaned the carpeting.

Aaron said...

Yep, the school was informed first thing this morning.

That's most likely where she got it as they have the kindergarten kids take naps in close proximity to each other....

IdentifyUS LLC said...

Schools may be lousy if they don't offer good educational opportunities, but they're not lousy with lice. Kids get them by direct head-to-head contact with other infested kids, whether that occurs in school or elsewhere. Do note that many kids are misdiagnosed. It is important that a living (crawling) louse be found before considering evasive action. Furthermore, all that house cleaning, laundering and boiling of brushes is unnecessary. More educational information, guidance on management and identification help can be found at IdentifyUS LLC.