NO Again the LICE NOooooooooo

Last year around this time we got a call from the school nurse that the girls had lice.

This was OHMYGODNOOOOO the worst thing ever EW EW EW a new challenge for us, but we burned everything calmly and methodically took care of the problem.  There was a lot of laundry and cleaning and combing for nits.  It was a nightmarish schedule crippling disaster time consuming and inconvenient, but we took care of it.  I figured we'd had our encounter with lice and we could cross that off our life list of gross things many families deal with.

But then this year the itching started. 
We've bagged the stuffed animals and stripped all the bedding and treated the heads (which this time included mine EW EW EW).  Ian consulted the CDC website and we are going by their recommendation to treat everyone again in nine days to completely interrupt the life cycle of the little buggers.  Whee.

I will say, though, the second time around (depressing as it was to have to repeat) hasn't been as bad.  Lice are puny.  I think if I could see their legs wiggling I would be far more freaked out by them, but they just look like long, grey specks, and they don't move fast.  The idea of them was worse than the reality.

And hunting for nits can be oddly soothing.  My primate nature kicks in and digging around on my girls' scalps becomes practically a bonding experience.  We have a system now of setting up my laptop in the bathroom and we watch Cupcake Wars or I Love Lucy while I work through their hair with a nit comb.  It's still not exactly pleasant, and I would prefer we watched things together while folding laundry instead, but time being close to my kids is time being close to my kids, so meh.

How does anyone handle a lice crisis as a single parent?  When I found a louse on my own scalp I was able to make my husband sit down and comb my head, but I can't imagine who else I would ask if he weren't around.

I suggested to the kids that I could make them lice costumes for Halloween and they would be the scariest things at the school dance in a few weeks.  Can you imagine?  Lice in the school!  Everyone runs screaming!  It would be awesome.  They, of course, balked at the idea, because they view Halloween as their chance to become the animals the long to be, and none of them fantasize about being lice.

My only fantasies about lice are imagining hearing on the news that gosh darn, the poor things couldn't find enough heads to lay eggs on one year and they are now extinct.  Oh well.  Them's the breaks.  (And then I win the Nobel Prize for kickboxing.  My inner life is a rich tapestry.)

We've also been passing around pink eye and a cold.  We're a close family (apparently too close), but disgusting.

How are you?