{"id":10587,"date":"2018-08-14T21:21:13","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T03:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=10587"},"modified":"2018-08-14T21:21:13","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T03:21:13","slug":"die-lice-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/08\/die-lice-die.html","title":{"rendered":"Die, lice, die!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

There ought to be a metaphor here somewhere . . . but let\u2019s start with the literal lice, which I had made it through nearly 18 years of parenting without encountering, until this past spring, when my middle son, who had just entered public high school and was eager to leave Catholic school hair length requirements behind and started growing out his hair, got lice from his friends at school.<\/p>\n

Yikes!<\/p>\n

We followed the instructions on the bottle.\u00a0 We did a second treatment about two weeks after the first.\u00a0 Later on, I inspected his hair and it looked fine.\u00a0 But then a week and a half ago he said that his scalp was itchy, and, lo and behold, they were back \u2014 or more likely had never left, and had just defeated my lice-detecting skills.\u00a0 So it was back to the store to buy another treatment kit.\u00a0 And this time around, after the initial treatment, I spent the time, every couple days, engaged in a search-and-destroy mission to try to get the remaining nits.\u00a0 (One bright spot: of my three boys, his hair is very fine; my youngest has moderately thick and my oldest very thick hair, which would be much harder to deal with.\u00a0 On the other hand, for them the solution would be a simple very, very short haircut \u2014 but I\u2019m trying to get the lice out without requiring that my middle son cut his hair.)\u00a0 And today I discovered that I did not get all the nits in time, and was removing hatchlings, and it\u2019ll be a battle to, again, try to get all the newly-hatched lice before they lay eggs and start the cycle again.\u00a0 And it is so maddenly\u00a0difficult to see these suckers \u2014 they look like fuzz until you\u2019ve wiped them off onto the lice comb.<\/p>\n

A few things I\u2019ve learnt\u00a0(which, on the other hand, aren\u2019t guaranteed to be true):<\/p>\n

The lice comb at the supermarket is only moderately useful.\u00a0 It\u2019s basically a very fine-toothed comb, but doesn\u2019t do much for the nits that are glued to your hair.\u00a0 Today I bought another one which seemed to do more at scraping the nits off (similar to this one<\/a>).\u00a0 I have also read that the chemical lice treatments are not as effective as you\u2019d like them to be because lice have become resistant; today we tried a different one which didn\u2019t make such lice-killing claims but promised to remove the \u201cglue\u201d by which the nits adhere to the hair; we\u2019ll see how well that worked.\u00a0 And reportedly, lice actually are more likely to infest kids who wash their hair regularly, as it makes it easier for the eggs to attach.<\/p>\n

It puts the expression \u201cnit-picking\u201d in a whole new light, of course \u2014 because however much \u201cnit-picking\u201d in the figurative sense implies being overly picky, in the case of literal nit-picking, you do indeed need to get every single one of the nits or hatchlings removed before they become mature lice, lay eggs, and start the cycle again.<\/p>\n

And, of course, I\u2019m kicking myself and wondering whether, in the first round, when I thought, after the two treatments, we were done, I would have known better if I had looked more closely, with better lighting, with a lice comb rather than just by parting the hair with my hands.\u00a0 But at the time, I figured that I had followed the directions and all would be well \u2014 after all, the product claimed to kill lice and nits, so surely any nits that weren\u2019t removed were dead anyway, right?\u00a0 Little did I know that wasn\u2019t the case!<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s our lice drama.<\/p>\n

Any resemblance to current events \u2014 well, let\u2019s say that\u2019s an exercise left to the reader.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

image:\u00a0 https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bugbuster.jpg; By Thanks for the polite permission of the Community Hygiene Concern, Joanna Ibarra (Deutsche Pediculosis Gesellschaft e.V.) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There ought to be a metaphor here somewhere . . . but let\u2019s start with the literal lice, which I had made it through nearly 18 years of parenting without encountering, until this past spring, when my middle son, who had just entered public high school and was eager to leave Catholic school hair length […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":10590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-10587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-family"],"yoast_head":"\nDie, lice, die!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There ought to be a metaphor here somewhere . . . but let's start with the literal lice, which I had made it through nearly 18 years of parenting without\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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