That’s my motto lately.  UGH!  It’s just been one thing after another around here.  I was so excited because I was finally finding the time to write a little and then chaos began to reign again.  Here’s a little taste of one thing that’s going on around here:

The main catastrophe we are dealing with is lice.  Just the word itself is enough to send shivers down your spine isn’t it!  We have never had lice in our house before – EVER.  I haven’t even had it since I was a little bitty kid – little enough I don’t even remember!  My mom told me about it.  So anyway, my daughter and I go to get our hair done a few weeks ago and as she’s looking at my hair to figure out colors and all that she starts looking closer and asks if I’ve ever had a problem with lice.  I tell her no and she keeps looking and decides it’s just dandruff.  Well, then she moves over to my daughter and things just go downhill from there.  She has me come over to the station where they were and shows me that my daughter has nits in her hair – definitely not dandruff.  So we are officially humiliated as we leave the salon (because they aren’t about to do anything to us in that condition! – not that I would expect them to) and we are just crushed because we weren’t able to get our hair done.  

You see, because we are a one-income family we don’t have the money for extras like that very often.  It’s a rare treat to go for something like that.  In fact, it was going to be a first for my daughter.  She’s never had anything done to her hair other than a haircut.  So that’s why we were so crushed.  We had been eagerly anticipating this day for quite awhile.  We had been waiting for an extra job that would provide a little extra money so that we could go in.  (The place where we went is awesome though because it’s a cosmetology department in a technical school so the cost is only $25 for a cut and color/highlight.)

So anyway, back to my story… We left and immediately went to the store and bought the products to treat and kill lice.  We came home and spent HOURS working on our hair.  I think I forgot to mention that we both have long hair – my daughter’s is extremely long!  We put the chemicals on, combed it out tiny section by tiny section, and thought that would be the end of it in our hair.  While we were working on our hair, I also had stripped both of our beds and started washing all of the bedding so that all lice would be gone.  I thought this would all be good and we would be done with it. And can I just say that the whole evening was a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worse enemy!!  It’s terrible!

Well, the lady told us we could come back in two weeks to try again with our hair – that would give the chemical enough time to go away so that it wouldn’t affect the chemicals in the color.  So, two weeks later we go back in there and I sit down and she looks and she says it looks great, we are good to go!  Yippee!  It worked and we can get our hair done finally.    Then she goes over to my daughter again.  I look at her in the mirror as she’s looking through her hair and my daughter’s face doesn’t look so good.  I turn around and the teacher looks at me and motions me over there and says there are still nits.  WHAT?!?  Are you kidding me!?!  I had even just looked at her hair right before we left the house and I didn’t see anything.  But sure enough, there the little nasty things are!      So, I did get to stay and have mine done but my daughter had to leave.  I felt so bad for her as she left.  She was just crushed again.

So now here we are, another week later and we are STILL finding nits in her hair!  We did the chemical the first time, then we did vaseline on her head for an entire night, I have done about a bazillion loads of laundry, I’ve combed her hair with the nit comb over and over again (which takes like 2 hours every time!  ugh!), I have vacuumed the entire house, we did an apple cider vinegar rinse and combed it out again, we put rosemary under her pillow because the smell is supposed to repel the lice.  It’s driving me CRAZY because we can’t get rid of the stupid nits!  The most baffling part is that I’ve yet to see a single stinkin’ bug!  You’d think in order to find that many nits we’d have to come across a bug or two.  NOPE!  There are none to be found!  Does anyone know of any magical cure for this stupid stuff??

One of the hardest things about all of this is that there is such a stigma attached to lice that we are afraid to talk to anyone about it for fear they’ll run and hide from us.  Not that I’d blame them!  It seems to be thought of as something that people who aren’t clean and don’t have good hygiend would get.  It’s kind of funny that it’s like that though because in order for lice to thrive your head and hair have to be really clean.  I told my daughter that maybe she should just not wash her hair for a few weeks – maybe they’d go away.