A little something for the folks upstairs...

We're on Day 3 of the Second Louse War. So far the lice are fighting a pretty tough delaying action.

We also had to sacrifice the Girl's outlying hair defenses in order to cut off the lice salients.

What remains is a more defensible perimeter. And the thinner foliage - believe me when I tell you that we went after that hair with the Rome Plow and the Agent Orange - provides much less concealment for the enemy infiltrators and the wily Lice Cong sappers who slip through the wire to lay nits and cause havoc.

We're now confident that no further dominoes are in jeopardy; I truly believe that that light is the end of the tunnel and not the headlamp of an oncoming train.

Eeek!

Again with the fucking lice!

This time it's got both of them; the Boy with nits, the Girl with both nits and active lice. When last heard from my bride was dunking Missy in preparation of going in under a hail of prescription lice-bane shampoo and the various debriding combs.

Plus the usual house-wide scouring of every bloody thing and washing of bedding and the immense menagerie of stuffed friends in both the Girl's and Boy's beds.

Fucketty fuckollaly fuck what a fucking nightmare.

Goddamn it, people, clean your goddamn house and keep your damn kids' heads clean. How freaking hard it that?

Grrrrr.

To a Louse, after Three Weeks With No Relief in Sight

Wee obligate para’sitical beastie,
O, what a party’s on her heidie!
Thou’s gae’n about being nasty
Above her chin!
I’m nae laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering Permetherin^TM.

I'm nae sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
Long syne thy hematophagic lugger.
Which sets me child tae scratchin’
At you, my oviparous bugger
Up there a hatchin’!

I doubt na, whyles, her blud may thieve;
What then? thou booger, thou maun live!
A drap or ickle o’ that serum
Is wha’ you’re suckin’;
I'll get a dose o’ interferon,
An' gie you a good...talkin’ to.

But Lousie, thou art such a pain,
And hard to pry from aft girlie's brain:
The best-laid schemes o' lice an' men
Gang aft agley,
At least thine will, if the louse-cream
Gives you your conge’!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
All you do is breed and flee:
But och! A fortnight or mair
She's still beloused!
And wi’ no daycare for me child,
I’m stuck i’ the house!

(Apologies to Robert Burns, and a hat tip to Lisa, who inspired this work)

OhmiGod! The kids are climbing the walls!

These are from the preceding weekend. Little Miss wanted to show what she had learned:Yeah, that'll get you a full ride at Stanford, sweetie.

But it did inspire the Boy to show us what HE could do. So here they are, climbing the walls:Sadly, the Great Louse Invasion still goes on - Mojo is home today steeping the Girl's head in some awful prescription Pemetherin^TM goop that's supposed to kill the little bastards. However, we've already tried the over-the-counter insecticide shampoos, which I read are already full of Pemetherin and have, apparently, facilitated the breeding of a race of super-lice immune to the toxin. Great.

I welcome our new ectoparasitic masters.

The lice return

Well.

First, let me entertain you with this little snippet of classic Warner Brothers hilarity; Beaky Buzzard and his rendition of "Bring Home a Baby Bumblebee". The actual song is in the first several seconds, so you gotta be quick:and now, for comparison, the utterly adorable Missy covering the same number:You will note how much more scrumptious she is. Do you like the teensy piping "Ouch! He stung me!" at the end? Thermonuclear cuteness, that girl. Anyway, the video fun is to get my mind off of the fact that the damn head lice have returned and this time, they've really done for us. Missy's daycare teacher saw the lice - or at least, nits, or so she says - and Little Girl is now banned from daycare until Monday. So Mojo has to stay home with her tomorrow and I will have to stay with her Thursday and Mojo again on Friday. It's all very irritating. So we're washing - again - the bedding and the clothing, vacuuming all over, doing everything we can think of to rid the place of these damn vermin.Why is it that kids seem to generate this sort of thing; colds and parasites and all sorts of niggling issues that are individually insignificant but taken altogether seem to occupy a pantsload of your waking time? I love my kids, but I sure wish they'd develop some sort of Teflon^TM coating for lice, viruses, and skanky boyfriends.

Oh, wait, we don't have to worry about that last one.

Yet.

Again with the cooties

Poor little Miss.

She just can't seem to repel the Louse Invasion.

So this Sunday we huddled inside against the nasty wet cold, I got in a steamy tub full of soapy water - the Girl likes her bathwater on the scalding side of hot - and scrubbed her little head thoroughly. After enough mermaid play I lifted her out, towelled her dry, and raised the shears above her head.Before you could say "Rapunzel" little Miss had lost half her shiny black hair.

Luckily for us we'd been preparing her for the moment for several days, reassuring her that it would grow back, explaining how we needed to trim her crop so that the Good Medicine could whack the Bad Bugs and stop them from making her head itch.So she was a very Good Little Girl and ended up with the appallingly cliche' Adorable Chinese Moppet Bowl Cut; she looks like she stepped off the package of some awful La Choy industrial-grade dinner. Sweet-and-sour pork, probably.

But that wasn't the idea. The idea was the civilized version of the Shaved Head And Purple Nit Paint of my youth; the idea was Death to Lice, and the Little Miss' defoliated dome worked like Agent Orange on a second-growth forest in the Ia Drang Valley. The little boogers got napalmed, and then Mojo went in behind the airstrikes with the tooth-comb ground assault and combed out the stay-behind ambushes and louse-egg booby traps.Mind you, everything has its cost. For us it was two anxious hours hovering over the Girl ensuring that the vile louse-shampoo stayed out of her "nose, eyes, mouth, and vagina" (according to the directions on the package. Who the hell goes around sticking louse shampoo in their lovely lady bits? Unless you're stupid enough to use this stuff on CRAB lice, which it very clearly tells you not to. Honestly, just when you think you've plumbed the depth of human inanity...). The pink headband was a means to keep the stuff off her face.Anyway, the entire effort seems to have been worth it. So far, Little Miss appears louse-free. And her mother does, too, since after several hours of furtive scratching (entirely sympathetic, IMO) Mojo dosed herself, too.

So here she is with her mom, both of them squeaky clean American Girls without a scintilla of nit between them.

Cooties

Tonight I tucked little Miss into her freshly made bed on her clean new pillow and told her a bedtime story of how she and I rode magical ponies over the rainbow to the Land of Nit-Free Hair where the Good Shampoo Fairy washed all the Bad Lice out of our hair.

Because that was what we had just done in the bathtub.Eeyagh! We have The Head Lice!