Lice is no fun and hard to get rid of

Is it an experience I hope you never have to go through, your child getting head lice.  I remember getting papers sent home from the school about lice, but not paying too much attention to it thinking my kids will never get lice. Boy was I wrong!

My daughter got lice from school last year in kindergarten. She got it from another student in the class. The day I noticed it was during a school singing performance. I saw her scratching her head while singing with her class. It wasn’t just a little itch, she was scratching quite a bit while singing her heart out.

I had heard about lice, but never experienced it for myself, so I really didn’t know what it looked like or what it really was. I had the misconception that kids that got lice didn’t have clean hair, when the truth is lice attracts to hair that is clean. And it can spread easily.

After the performance, I checked my daughter’s head and didn’t see anything. We went home and she was still itching. I thought maybe she was allergic to medicine I had given her for a cold. I called the doctor to tell them I thought she may be allergic to the medicine. The nurse said she couldn’t be allergic that maybe she had lice. She told me to check under her hair near the back of her neck.

When I checked the back of her neck, I almost had a heart attack when I saw a little critter in my daughter’s hair. My poor child had lice. I just couldn’t believe it. And I knew it had to have been there for awhile because it had grown from an egg to a louse. The nurse told me calmly what to do. She told me to put mayonnaise on her head and wrap it with saran wrap to suffocate the lice. She also told me to get the lice shampoo at the store to wash her head. I also needed to wash all the bedding in case the lice spread. I had to put all her stuffed animals in a plastic bag for a few weeks. It was pretty much a nightmare. I must have had at least 10 loads of laundry. I washed everything in hot water. I went to the store to buy the lice shampoo. You can also get a lice spray for the house. It is an aerosol that you can spray on the couches and beds. The lice died pretty fast. After washing the mayonnaise out of my daughter’s hair and drying her hair I put the lice shampoo in. You than have to comb the hair with a small pick to get the eggs or nits out. It took a long time. I have heard of people cutting their kids hair or shaving it because it takes so long to get lice out. My daughter has really long hair to her waist, so we spend hours combing her hair to get the nits out. We had to make sure she didn’t have any of the eggs in her hair. The nits look like dandruff. We thought we had it. I took her to school the next day and they checked her and she was fine. Thank goodness. I was just worried someone else in the family or her class would get it. Luckily no one else did.

Still we had to check my daughter each day for a week to make sure she didn’t have any nits. The directions from the shampoo said to wash her hair again with the special shampoo a few days later just to make sure everything was gone. My daughter was a trooper. We worked hard at eliminating those nasty little bugs.

I remember googling lice and finding out exactly what they looked like. I also wanted to see what it said about it. I found out that these tiny insects can last awhile on the head and can easily spread by contact or by touch bedding of someone with it or share combs with someone that has it. If you have young kids make sure they don’t share combs because that can easily transfer the eggs. I also found the most common age for lice is age 3 to 12 and girls get it more than boys. I now spray my kids hair with hairspray just to make it not so clean.

Even though lice can’t cause any serious medical problems, they are truly annoying and a headache to get rid of.