Nits 'n Fevers

You know you're a parent when sweet tiny white lights strung across a quiet lane of grass stop you in your tracks because they look so much like nits on a strand of hair..

Nits of course are the eggs that head lice lay and if you’ve cared for children at all in your life you have probably seen them. It happens on the day your child comes into the room scratching. Scratching in the morning, still scratching at noon. Along about suppertime you see him again and still his hands are in his hair and think WAIT A MINUTE YOU DON”T SUPPOSE?! And you pull him onto your lap and there behind the ear and along the hairline where it's nice and warm you see them: elliptical shaped eggs sticky as all Hell. No fingers can remove them and no tweezers for they are too numerous. Only the special shampoos will do the trick which you must immediately rush out to buy.

You lay the child back in the bath and soap him up. Many small bugs float out into the water and that’s the easy part. Then you towel the child off and do all you can to distract him from this next worst step which involves going at the critters’ eggs with a metal comb whose teeth are so close together that an angel’s daydreams couldn’t get through them.

There is crying and lamentation and heavy sweating and it’s all coming from you, your child having passed out 90 seconds in.

I thought about Bad Times on Vacation because here we are in a gorgeous oasis of a place called The Arizona Inn in sunny Tucson and what do you think? Within three hours of deplaning our little grandson Eddie got the flu.

Kids always get sick when you travel with them. It was never vacation for us unless we were in some clinic or ER when our kids were small; watching the pretend television of the washers and driers at the Laundromat tumbling the clothes that had been so amply thrown up on etc.Tonight I got to stay home with sick little Eddie while the others went out to a fancy restaurant. I had already volunteered for this duty even BEFORE he got sick and was happy to do it. When I got to his hotel room his mum had him and his 103-degree-plus fever were in the bath trying to ward off whatever horrible things come to you when the heat gets turned up that high.

Well I can tell more about what happened in that there room tomorrow but for now let us enjoy these images together because we are all God’s creature are we not? And the insects? Honey the insects are gonna be here LONG after we’re gone!