I woke up late and was in a hurry getting Jonah ready for school. He was grumpy because he had to go to school, but Evie didn’t. He was shoveling a waffle in his mouth and trying to button his school tie, while Evie was laying on the couch in her PJs with my computer. She decided she wanted to make a slideshow on Microsoft PowerPoint. At first, her preferred subject was Mount Everest, but then she decided to learn about dogs. I don’t know if other kids wake up at 7 am and decide to learn random stuff - but my brainy 9-year old certainly does. She came up behind me while I was making coffee. “Mom, did you know? Dalmatians are born white! And dogs are born blind and deaf! And there are over 300 breeds of dogs! And that dogs can smell our emotions… I mean, not exactly. They can smell changes in the human body odor which indicate our stress levels and emotions! Something about fer-o-moneys…I don’t know what that is. And…”
Can Taco sense that you’re annoying me now? I wanted to say.
“Evie! Please! Can you be quiet for a moment?” I snapped.
My reprimand was enough to make Evie start to cry.
“I’m sorry, Bug, I didn’t mean to snap. But I’m very tired. Please let me get my coffee and then you can tell me all about dogs.”
I’m exhausted today because just before bedtime last night, I noticed Evie scratching her head like Taco during his bout of fleas. I asked her to come and let me look at her hair, and when I explained why, she started running around the room screaming. But sure enough - there they were. A little brownish grey thing the size of a sesame seed jumped on my shirt as I was picking through her hair. Ick.
Ironically, I had recently been thinking about how lucky we’d been as parents. We haven’t had to deal with lice, pinworms, or any number of nasty things that come with kids. I guess it was our turn.
At 8:30pm, Chris was running to three different stores to try to find lice treatment kits. It took me until 10:30pm to finish washing and combing Evie’s hair. She was surprisingly cooperative. She took a piece of blue construction paper and kept a tally of how many “adults” we found dead and alive. She gave them names:
The living ones were named Lilly, Sally, Stinker, Licey, Spooky, and Sam.
The dead ones were named Lucy and Lillian. (They weren’t really dead; I just told her this to make her think we were making progress).
This sounds funny upon reflection, but when picking bugs out of your child’s hair at 10:30pm on a school night, nothing is funny.
“Why were they alive?” you might ask. One great success of microevolution is that modern lice have developed a hardy resistance to lice-killing shampoo. Chat GPT tells me they’re called “Super Lice.” Now, most shampoos are a scam that costs $30 per bottle. It doesn’t say on the bottle that they are HARD to kill. And you have to remove and clean all your bedding, sheets, clothing, and potentially infected upholstery. It’s a pain in the @#$.
“Where are my pillowcases?!” Chris said, frustrated.
“I had to take everything off to wash…and sorry, we ran out of clean ones.”
“Well, I need to go to bed. What do you want me to do!?”
I handed him a blanket to wrap around his naked pillow.
“You’re a smart man. You’ll figure it out…”
Chris and the kids eventually went to bed, but I stayed up past midnight treating myself prophylactically with the shampoo that obviously doesn’t work. This morning, we were all tired. I was rushing Jonah and instructing him to quit getting so close to his sister. I started looking through her hair again with the flashlight on my phone to see what was left.
“Did they leave more eggs?” demanded Evie.
“I think we got most of them.” I said.
“I want eggs!” said Jonah, seriously. “I will hatch them and take care of them. They will be my pets.”
In our family, we love all of God's creatures. In addition to normal cats, dogs, and guinea pigs, we’ve had five praying mantises (all named Manny), spiders, worms, butterflies, ant farms, and a family of roly polys - until the day when Jonah left the box open, and they escaped all over my living room for Taco to find and eat. Another time, Jonah had a full-blown meltdown because I’d killed a garden slug. He cried for two hours and screamed at me "YOU EVIL SLUG KILLER!”
I try to be a chill mom. But I draw the line at human parasites.
After we finally got Jonah out the door, my first task was to contact the school, the church, and all the parents that had been at our weekend birthday party. I was extremely apologetic, and thank the Lord, everyone was gracious. Chris went to the drugstore to buy a different brand of very expensive shampoo (marketed for “super lice”). We repeated the treatment, which took several more hours. I was relieved not to find more bugs for Evie to name. Next, I started on the mountain of laundry.
When Evie and I were fully lice-free, we went to a coffee shop where we drank cappuccinos. My kids are my kids - so they love good coffee, but I make them drink decaf. Evie wrote a poem about lice, and we laughed and played chess.
Our very bad day was redeemed.
Lice
by Evie
Lice are not so nice.
They’re everywhere - in your hair.
They lay eggs smaller than pegs.
They don’t care
They’re more than I can bear.
They can live on animals - including dogs
But they cannot live on frogs.
They’re so small
But don’t take them to the mall.
They might try to bite
And then we’ll have a fight.
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