The little white bugs that destroy your life

When L was 4 she got head lice **Correction: when L was 4 AND 6 😭**. We still don’t know who she got it from since no one from daycare or school had it but whatever; it happened. And thankfully it happened AFTER we donated 10 inches of her hair 🙌🙌🙌 And after what seemed like weeks of treating the hair and combing out every little section so we couldn’t even see dandruff, it was gone.

Since then we have tried to do a few things that can hopefully help prevent this in the future (although, I ain’t stupid. I know there is a good chance it will happen again).

1. Tea tree oil – upon permission from our doctor (always super important to do that before starting anything new, even if it is a natural product) we began putting one drop of tea tree oil in her shampoo every couple of weeks. This is supposed to act as a repellent should she be in a situation where she is exposed. We started this a bit with R, too, but E, M and G are too little for the oil so we will wait to get the green light from our doctor.

2. Talk to the kids about not sharing hats, brushes, etc. This one is tough though. One day L came home from school talking about sharing a hat with a friend *WARNING WARNING* so I told her that is how lice can spread so we should only wear our own hats. She took at as oh, my friend must have lice and all I could picture was L being that kid telling everyone that this girl had lice even though she didn’t – although I know L would not intentionally be malicious like that. I had to revisit the conversation a couple of times to make sure she knew lice could only spread on a hat if it was there to be spread.

Which leads me to a few things I learned about lice:

1. It is not just on the dirty kids. It can happen to any kid so the stereotype that it’s only kids who don’t bathe regularly is just not true.

2. Make sure you not only wash everything INSIDE your house but also any car seats in your cars. Lice can stick around on those things and you could be back to nit picking way sooner than you’d like.

3. For things that can’t be machine washed, seal in a plastic bag for 2 weeks to suffocate the lice.

4. HEAT! Wash everything on hot and blow dry/straighten/curl hair for another way to kill those nasty things.

After the last week we’ve had, I’ve decided we are all either shaving our heads or wearing shower caps 24/7.