More re: the lice.

[pegkerr]

I suspect Delia picked it up this past week at camp. She was going to horseback riding camp, and they gave out helmets every day. I have a hunch one of the helmets she used was infested.

I saw the louse while we were listening to the sermon in church. I grabbed it out of her hair and tipped it into a piece of paper. Yep. A louse. I showed it to Delia and she started to cry, so hard that I just grabbed the girls and left after the sermon was over. Rude, but I was upset enough myself that I couldn't bring myself to care very much.

But it doesn't seem to be a very bad case. Other than that one adult louse, we found a tiny one, and two nits. That was it. We treated Delia but no one else, since we didn't find them on anyone else, and we're not going to be obsessive about the cleaning this time, either.

I can only do so much, dammit.

Comments

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

Aww Peg, I know how frustrating that can be. When Chris and Linda were about 8 and 11, Chris got lice. I was in a panic as she had long hair. So did Linda and we didn't know how long the lice had been around. What I did was to cut both of their hair and get the special shampoo and the lice combs and go through their short hair. Then I washed their hair every day for a week. For the house, I bought about six cans of RAID that said it killed lice and I spayed all of the furniture and the the carpets and then I vacuumed, threw away the vacuum cleaner bags outside and repeated the process. I also washed their bedlinen and then sprayed it every day for a couple of weeks just to be sure. We had no more lice so that process worked. It was also much easier than washing everything every day! Oh, and I threw out all of our combs and brushes and bought new ones.

Good luck with it. Chris got the lice from allowing her hair to touch a drinking fountain at school. She saw a louse in that fountain two days later. We were in California where lice are a problem year round. They are here too and I worry that one of my workers children will pick them up and bring them here. My hair is long, finally, for the first time in 45 years and I surely would hate to have to cut it all off because someone brought a louse into my house!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Sympathies. I've got three kids of my own and am somewhat involved in raising a fourth, so I'm no stranger to this problem. I didn't think they could survive in something like a helmet, though - I've always heard that they only spread through direct head-to-head contact, which is more common amongst kids than you might think. I've found the best way to deal with them is the comb-and-conditioner method - I swore off the chemical treatments after we got an outbreak of pesticide-resistant lice. I also now make a point of covering my own hair if I'm in a house that's suffering from an outbreak, or have a child visiting from a house that does.

[kokopoko.livejournal.com]

That is so hard on kids.

Isn't there a limerick about a louse on a hat worn by a lady in church? I swear I read it somewhere.