Circle, Circle, Dot, Dot, Now You've Got Your Cootie Shot.

Sorry no recent updates, peeps. I've been crazy busy trying to plan out Christmas with a google calender and everything! I've decided this year is going to be the year that I have it all in order. And thank you so much, for those of you who recommended gift ideas for Tuba Girl! They're on my list and I've also managed to use your suggestions as a springboard for other possible ideas.

I'll update on Christmas proceedings along the way, but I had this random Lice Thought today and thought I'd talk about lice. I detest lice. I suppose everyone does, but I seem to have super creeped-out aversion to all things parasitic. Which is one of the major reasons I won't have a dog or cat or pretty much anything else that may shit worms at any given point.

I'm a pretty strong chick about some things. My friends call me to removed their tiny little garden snakes from their yard and I handle emergencies pretty well. But I cannot pick ticks off a dog. I will hurl. It's just one of those things. So we don't do ticks and fleas or worms or any of that shit.

Now my kids do end up with ticks from time to time and I've successfully managed to handle that. But those are my kids. I am required to do so by natural law. Dogs are not my children. They're on their own.

Anyway, back to the lice thing. It randomly crossed my mind how lucky we've been because we haven't had a bout of the creepy crawlies in over six years. (Of course, the minute I post this, we're going to end up with some hardcore new kind where the nits are buried under the scalp and they come oozing out of their nostrils or something equally horrific.) But all the same, I'm very pleased that I have three children in public school and they haven't come home crawling with . . . things. It really creeps me out. Horribly. Seriously.

The Great Lice Battle of Ought Three was brought on by a woman whom I knew in a round about way, but I didn't exactly consider her a "friend" or someone that I even want to associate with on any personal level. However, as noted in the Stinky Motherfucker files, I tend to be overly polite to dumbasses.

I don't know why. Maybe it's the train wreck factor. Maybe I'm scared they'll go crazy and burn down my house. Or maybe I'm just stupid. Unless someone is purposefully rude or mean to me, I rarely ever make my displeasure known. And even when someone is purposely rude, I tend to either not recognize it or just keep going about my business because I have shit to do.


Anyway, this damned chick showed up at my house one summer when Wild Boy was about six months old. She's a pregnophile of some sort. She adores being pregnant. She also can't afford all those damned kids. But whatever. Her life.

One thing, though, that I've  noticed about woman who love being pregnant is that's about it. The children are some unfortunate by-product. I don't know if it's just a local issue or some widespread weirdness, but a lot of women love being pregnant because it infuses a little drama into their life and keeps the focus on them. However, the end result is a baby and the baby is only good for attention for so long before you have to go off and get another one. I think this chick, the last I heard, was on pregnancy number eight.

I was "visiting"  with this person in my house (and by visiting, I mean wishing she'd shut the hell up and go away because I'm about to miss fucking NAP TIME) when I idly looked down at six-month-old Wild Boy. I'd just had him returned to be by my company's eight-year -old child who'd spent several minutes holding him on the living room floor trying to talk him into eating a teething biscuit.

I looked down at Wild Boy, looked up at all these damned people in my house, and then looked down again until I was sure I had his watermelon baby head in focus (that's his daddy's head, not mine) and proceeded to nearly have a screaming hissy as I picked a louse bug off his head and squished it between my fingernails.

I gaped at it a minute, stared at this woman sitting in my living room with a bottle propped up in her baby's mouth and her four other disheveled children running around my house and my heart sank. Eventually, I managed to get my unwanted company and their "company" packed off and home without freaking the hell out and immediately began damage control.

This was not my first bout with lice and I actually spent six months battling the little fuckers a couple of years previous because Tuba Girl kept contracting it at school. I learned a lot that year.

What I learned is that, generally speaking, the lice shampoos do not work very well anymore. Like most anything else, the bugs are adapting to the shampoo and they don't always die. So while it's a good idea to start with the shampoo, it doesn't end there.

Step 1: Shampoo everyone's head with the lice shampoo.
Step 2: Go through hair with a nit comb. You need to handle maybe about five strands of hair at a time and then pen that section up when you're done. This is serious work and you can't just comb through as if you were brushing.  
Step 3: Wash all linens in hot water.
Step 4: Bag up all stuffed animals and any blankets that cannot be washed in airtight containers for a minimum of two weeks. 
Step 5: Vacuum all carpets.
Step 6: Boil all brushes, combs and other hair items. 

This is basic stuff. However, as I said before, the shampoo doesn't kill them as well anymore. On top of that, the shampoo is very expensive and can break a person's budget. If you don't kill every last bug and remove every last nit, then you highly stand the chance of re-infestation. AND(!), if you send your child back to school, he or she can catch it again especially if you have not notified the school that your child has had lice.

Whenever your child has head lice and you discover it on your own, please, please notify your child's school so that they can do head checks and make sure other children aren't infested. If you don't do this, then you're creating an endless cycle and you can spend hundreds of dollars trying to get rid of this shit because it's not all taken care of at the same time.

There are a lot of natural remedies I've discovered that are pretty effective in murdering lice. You can use them in place of the pesticide shampoos or in conjunction. The last couple of times we had this, I only used natural remedies instead of the shampoo. The boys were very young and I didn't like the idea of putting pesticides on their head. I was as successful in getting rid of the lice as I'd been with the shampoo treatments.

Things I've used to be effective:

1. Vinegar rinse - rinse the infested person's head with vinegar as this helps to loosen the glue nits use to hang around on your head. You can either do a whole head rinse or dip a cotton ball in vinegar and run it down the strands of hair you are about to comb.
2. Comb out hair a few strands of time using a fine toothed metal nit comb. Drop the eggs and/or bugs into a bowl of vinegar to kill them. 
   
3. Olive Oil - (You can use whatever can you want. I just bought a big gallon can of the shit.) Douse each person's head in olive oil, wrap in saran wrap or shower cap and leave over night. Other people swear by mayonnaise, sunflower oil, and Vaseline among other greasy products. The idea is that you are suffocating the bugs. (This doesn't do anything about the nits, however.).
   
4. Wash with dish detergent to cut the oil out. It may take a couple of washings and to be perfectly honest, I was never able to quite get all the olive oil out of my own hair whenever I washed it. I looked like a sad little white woman attempting to do some dastardly Jheri curl, but I'd rather be greasy than lousy in the long run. We did the olive oil thing every three days for three straight weeks because I'm  creeped out by bugs and shit living ON MY HEAD. 
5. Make your own lice repelling shampoo. I don't know if this really, really works or not, but I did it because when it comes to getting rid of lice, I'll try anything short of standing nekkid on the interstate. I bought a cheap lavender shampoo, added 20 drops of lavender oil, 20 drops of olive oil, 20 drops of rosemary oil, and 20 drops of tea tree oil to the bottle. I can't remember the exact reasoning, but it seems like I remember the rosemary and lavender oils were supposed to repel lice and tea tree oil is just some good shit in general.
   
6. Shampoo regularly with the lice repelling shampoo and check routinely for the possibility of a new infestation. 

Getting lice is a real pain in the ass and I hate it something horribly. As I said before, as soon as that lice infested chick left my house that day I immediately set to work and pretty well headed the whole situation off at the pass.

The thing is, the crazy whore showed up at my house about two weeks later asking me to watch her kids for a little while so she and her husband could go out for their anniversary. I told her I couldn't because I hadn't been feeling well. I was trying to not be rude and tell her she'd given us bugs on her last visit so I went with the "not feeling well" bit. Which, in truth, I wasn't. Wild Boy had a lot of ailments going on at the time and it was hard keeping up with him, two others, the house and all this other crap on four hours of sleep a night and maybe an afternoon nap if stupid people didn't show up at my house. I was continually "not feeling well."

However, this was the kind of woman who doesn't really give a flying shit about anything and remains insanely oblivious to much of the world around her. I stood at the door trying to say no without being rude and screaming something like, "Get your lousy ass out of my doorway!"

Finally, when one of her little infested children shot between my legs and ran to my daughter's room,  I looked at her and said,"I really can't keep your kids. We have lice." Although, I'd actually taken care of it. I lied because I thought it was would work much like saying, "We have the bubonic plague" or something like that. Except it didn't.

The crazy woman looked at me and said, "Oh! That's okay! We have it, too. I've got the medicine and stuff at the house so I can come over and help you get rid of it. I was going to handle it before school starts anyway."

No.thank.you.

I don't know who kept her little infested children for her anniversary, but I know I spent the rest of the summer virtually secluded dealing with the second bout of lice she brought to us. Oh, good times.
Good times.I was very happy they moved right before school began so at least her children were no longer going to KAR Elementary.

So that's how I've dealt with lice. I've found it to be pretty successful. You may want to try checking out some websites to see what may work best for your family.

Next time, amigos.