Dealing with the ever taboo topic of lice

Ever dealt with lice? It’s not fun so when I saw an email arrive in my inbox with the subject “3 Tips to Lick Lice” I was intrigued. Clicking over to Leah Ingram’s Suddenly Frugal blog, I recognized a couple of steps I used a couple of years ago on my children but I also see a few I wanted to add.

Even though winter is a time that kids share hats and scarves (despite our best attempts to avoid it) and lice seem to spread wildly during this time, my long-haired daughters got lice a couple of years ago after the school dealt with a breakout in the Spring. Cleared by the nurse like everyone else, my girls left our Pennsylvania home for a summer visit at the Southern home of my parents, one itching her scalp without my knowledge. A week and a half into their visit, I get a call.

“Sarah, one of the girls appears to have lice.”

Ugghhh! I packed my bags and drove the entire day. Upon arrival, I immediately pulled out a tarp, plopped each girl, one-by-one, in a chair and chopped about a third of their hair off. Some would suggest shaving but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My cousin came two days later to straighten out my snip job.

BUT, we learned a few things in the process:

1. Lice do LIKE clean hair. My older daughter who, at the time, avoided washing her hair like the plague only had a few obvious lice nits (or shells), which stick like glue on the hair. My younger daughter was seriously infested though she loves washing her hair and being clean.
2. You have to kill the lice somehow. If you haven’t, they will come back and the gestation is about two weeks. Many people don’t like using the commercial products with 1% permethrin in them so as Ingram said, you can use olive oil but we used mayonnaise. We slopped it on, rubbed it in, wrapped my girls’ hair in saran wrap with a shower cap holding it on and left it on overnight, sleeping on towels to catch the excess drainage. My cousin swore by this method, with is also a wonderful moisturizer, despite no scientific evidence available to prove it. Since then I have heard of people using a wash of vinegar. Others added a wash of Listerine to relieve the irritation to the scalp, again with no available proof except personal testimony.
3. You also need to get the nits out which, as I mentioned earlier, stick to the hair like glue and shine in bright light. They are tiny but you can see them under a lamp. Lice kits vary in the fine tooth comb they supply but I found that the comb provided with a bottle of “No Lice or Nits Mousse Shampoo” was the absolute best. Sometimes you can pick out the little nits with your fingernails but this particular shampoo also claimed to dissolve the nits and after using it, I truly saw no more nits. It also claimed no pesticides or toxins either. If you can find, I highly recommend it.
4. It’s time to give everything a thorough cleaning. Wipe surfaces and vacuum everywhere. I used a lint brush on my parent’s furniture and sprayed one of the lice sprays from one of the drug stores. We bagged up the stuffed animals (since as Ingram states, according the American Academy of Pediatrics, lice cannot stay alive for more than 48 hours once they are off your child’s head). BUT, eggs can rehatch at about two weeks and reinfest your child. You will see several recommendations to keep anything, that can’t be washed in really hot water and put in the dryer on high heat, bagged for about three weeks. At that point, any eggs will have hatched and any new lice will be dead.

Best wishes if you have to deal with it. It is not fun but it is not uncommon either.

UPDATE: After posting this article in the Phoenix, I received this valuable insight from the Texas Lice Squad:

In the Phoenix, January 30

Tagged as: lice