Head Lice No Big Deal

A four-year-old of mine came home once with head lice. It happens. It’s no big deal. But the case was so bad even the doctor was amazed. “I’ve never actually SEEN so many of the actual creatures"  he mused, fascinated.

The lice look like this:

Not really but what a cute picture huh?And the hatched eggs, also called ‘nits’, look like this:For the most part the nits are what you’ll see, mostly hangin ‘out behind the ears or at the nape of the neck where the temperature is toastiest. They’re white and elliptical in shape and they stick like glue, which is why you have to go get the hellish steel comb to drag along each affected strand of hair.Head lice are of course different from pubic lice, also known as “crabs.” If you’re partnered and you come home with a case of crabs wellllll… you might just have some susplainin’ to do as Ricky used to say to his bride Lucy.But let us look up rather than down here. We could quote Robert Burns’s  “To a Louse” but it’s such unintelligible old Scottish not even Mel Gibson could understand it. We could quote John Donne’s “The Flea” in which the smitten narrator grows jealous of the little critter he assumes has just trundled from his own person to the person of his still-chaste beloved. “It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee!" he gushes and gimme a break I know but what can we say? The man was an innocent, and head over heels to boot.Well lice are innocents too and only doing what God intended them to do, so if they come to your house for heaven’s sake take it in stride. As the Kids Health website says, “Don’t panic; this ISN’T a major drama.”Think of how animals look when they groom one another. Pretty mellow, right? So just use the special shampoo, surrender your scalp to your closest pal and pretend you’re both monkeys. Better than a day spa, yo, and at a fraction of the cost!

Revolt of the Powerless

Little kids are so sweet the way they repeat their parents’ phrases. A while ago I was sitting with a little girl two who really REALLY wanted the toy that this seven-month-old beside her was clutching, maybe because it wasn't even a toy so much as totally delightful AID TO RELAXATION, a sort of wee vibrating robot that looks like this:

She just WANTED this gizmo. Bad. And so said “I’m sure the baby would be happy to share that with me.” She'd heard this phrase from her parents evidently and decided to give it a try -  and just like that the thing was buzzing away in her hand and she was smilin' to beat the band.

The trick in life, children,  is to manipulate reality with words, just like she did: say a thing and hope that the saying will make it so. I know it's a scam I personally have been tryin' to run for like 50 years now.

But what would happen if little kids turned the tables and used those powerful suggestions on us their keepers? We say to them “Shall I check your hair now?" meaning 'Shall I drag this painful metal-toothed comb through your tender scalp looking for nits?' We NEVER say "Would you like a bath tonight or should we just say the hell with it?", NEVER ask “Would you LIKE me to find the tenderest hairs at the  nape of your neck and rake my fingers through them?” Oh no. It's all false choices we offer them, like those personality tests that ask if you’d rather have your nostril hairs pulled out one by one or be thrown from a third floor window.  “Should we take the lice-comb to you first or start the evening's activities by scouring your bottom with infernally stinging baby wipes WHILE GRASPING YOUR TINY ANKLES AND HOISTING THEM HIGH ABOVE YOUR HEAD? “

What I worry about is when the tables turn at which point “Will that be paper or plastic?" won't exactly be the choice that they're offering us.  More like “Mom? Dad? Will that be the pillow over your face or an overdose of Nyquil?" when we’re all 110 and they’re 80 and sick to death of us.

In fact what I think is we should fork over all our foot massagers, head ticklers and heating pads RIGHT NOW - and  maybe, just maybe, they’ll let us live.

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!