Last July my children and I got the HAIR DEMONS (otherwise known as lice).  Guess what, you’ll never guess!!  I brushed my hair a couple weeks ago, and out came hair demons!  I had really missed those guys, and apparently they’d missed me too.  But that’s not all!  My eldest, Thing One, also had the parasites from Hades, only she forgot to tell me about them, so just went to school that day, treatment free.

We’re Back!!!   Hi!!!

That’s okay, though, because you know what?  Now many schools no longer check kids routinely for our buggy friends.  Not only that, they don’t warn you when there’s a case of them going around, nor do they send your kid home from school, nor do they require that the kid have been treated before coming back.  Isn’t that awesome?  Their reasoning is that hair demons aren’t gonna kill you that much, so no biggie.  Also some higher ups were afraid of hurting a child’s feelings, should another child find out they had the demons.

. . .

Yeah, here’s the thing school administrators, who I dearly hope get a case of these “not that bad” parasites.  You know what is worse than annoyed parents who have to keep their kids home cause of bugs, or the school nurse who is annoyed having to check for bugs when she could be gossiping in the office (maybe just my nurse?), or a kid being teased for having bugs?  Worse is giving the bugs to every single one of their classmates AND their parents, and if you aren’t looking, maybe YOU administrators.  I’m planning on sending lots of infected children to your fancy offices and having them give you BIG HUGS with lots of head touching!  That’s how much I appreciate your decisions!

You can’t stand in the way of immigration! I’m calling my Congressman!

Because while lice do not kill you (unless you take a sledgehammer to your own head), they end up costing lots of money AND time AND stomach acid because I’m sorry but they make me want to hurl.  Let’s say you get lucky and you buy a kit of over-the-counter demon treatment, or you get creative and try salad dressing or oil from a tree or you put your child’s head inside a sealed bag for what is it – two weeks?  And this treatment (usually a fun shampoo with an eu de rotten eggs that you scrub and rinse out) actually kills the buggers!  You still aren’t done.  Next you have to comb their hair with a very fine toothed comb to get out what you killed.  Don’t even think about using the plastic piece of crap they give you in the kits.  Get the Lice Terminator comb from Amazon.  It will pull out anything, including hair, but not as much as the other combs.  Over the eternity that you comb (because if you miss even one it might still hatch and make a new gang of buddies!) you will find stuff Stephen King wishes he could make up.

If I got clowns in my hair, that would surely be a sign of End Times.

Then you get to wash the sheets or whatever else you’ve touched lately in HOT AS HADES water to kill ’em all.  I recommend doing this six or seven times to make sure.  I did need to wash my sheets as it had been . . . I needed to wash my sheets anyway.  But still.  Then you wait a week, combing each day (you’ll see why later), and shampoo the head one more time just in case and comb and wallah the infestation is gone!  Until a few weeks later, when inevitably your kid gets it again from some other kid who has tons of bugs but hey, positive self-esteem.

Believe it or not, that’s the good scenario.  The bad one happened to me, which is why I’m writing this slightly psychotic post.  Thing One and I treated ourselves (ice cream is better) and a day later I combed on her hair.  And . . .

Forget kitties, Animal Planet has this!

My eldest has beautiful, thick hair that curls on its own and predicts humidity (Is it a white girl fro?  Expect rain!).  Unfortunately, the bugs like this also because they get a multi-level condominium.  Every time I brought the comb back, it was full of friends.  Every. Time.  It’s okay, I told myself because I was being all grown-up.  We’ll handle it!  It will be better tomorrow!

It wasn’t.

I kept finding the creatures, and way too many of them were still alive.  Even Thing Two helped me comb, cause that kid has a stomach of steel.  After about a week, I snapped.  What was going on here?  I’d dealt with this before, but this time we were looking at a spot on that show Infested.  (Yes, it’s a show, or it was.  Even with my fear of bugs, I watched it just in case I got a new bug, so I could get really paranoid it was deadly).  So we went to the doctor for the bug nukes and the girls and I received prescriptions.  My husband went to the pharmacist and discovered that bug nukes cost 50 dollars a bottle.  That’s right!  For little 8 oz bottles that would supposedly be enough for two treatments.

It’ll work! For sure!

But I’m still not finished!  For one thing, at the doctor we discovered that Thing One hadn’t had the demons for one week.  She’d been tolerating them for a solid month because she didn’t want to add any more stress to a slightly imploding family.  Or like, deal with bugs.  That explained some things.  I think I’ve found the most tolerant kid in existence.  Anyway, we now had the good stuff, one bottle of which took care of ONE treatment of the new civilization we’d found in her hair.  Thing Two’s hair is lovely too but thinner and finer which at that point made it the best hair in the universe.

A week (and six years) later and the Things and I have been washed and combed again.  No bugs spotted – so far.  The Things totally didn’t go back and use the same hairbrushes, I’m sure of it.  I found shampoo with mint (the smell not the actual mints I think) that lice supposedly don’t like, as well as another that smells like grass that I don’t like any more than the bugs.  Also tea tree oil.  It better work cause it smells too.  I might have warned my beloved Things that if they didn’t listen to Mommy and do their part in preventing future invasions, there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as my psyche would completely dissolve.  Also: buzzcuts.

The End!

~Alice