If you keep reading, you are brave. The mere sight of the word “lice” makes my skin and scalp start to itch. If you have not had lice hit your household yet, consider yourself incredibly lucky. I wish I could forget, but the experience is branded in my memory.

It was a Saturday. My hubby and I were actually going to get out of the house to go on a date night. I had given my daughter, who has crazy, curly hair that was out in its full wild glory, a bath so I could get her all ready for bed before the sitter came. I sat down to comb her hair to put it into some cute pigtails. To try to tame the mane. I got a barrette to part her hair, as I parted her hair, I saw movement. I blinked for a minute because I thought my vision was messing with me. I looked again. There was movement. I froze. I googled; confirmed–lice. Trying my best not to scare my daughter, I went into the kitchen and grabbed the saran wrap, olive oil and a plastic bag. Armed with my odd array of kitchen items I began to slather the olive oil all over her head. I’m pretty sure she thought I was losing it, which I was, but I tried to play it cool even though I wanted to scream and run away.

That was my temporary solution until I could go buy the Nix. I also poured the olive oil into my own hair and wrapped my head in saran wrap, topped off with a stylish tied-up plastic bag. Immediate head situation was contained, but now my mind wandered to the other possibilities. I googled. My choices were to bag up basically my entire home and not open the bags for two weeks, bleach combs, brushes. I opted to throw a lot of things away, just completely and utterly disgusted. Bedding and other things I put in the dryer for the 60 minutes it said. I put pretty much anything I could through a 60 minute dryer cycle.

If you haven’t had to deal with lice, you may be reading this and thinking, what a nut job. Let me just say, when you see bugs crawling in your kid’s hair, try not to go nuts cleaning every nook of your home. My buddy Google actually said you don’t have to go crazy cleaning, but how could I not clean? I looked at my little son who was only about 5 months old and wondered if he could have it in his baby fine hair. Thankfully, he did not. My hubby was the luckiest man alive because he is bald. I threatened that maybe he should check his leg hair. I stared at my dog. I googled. Lucky for dogs, their skin is too thick to get lice, or maybe it was their hair. I’ve forgotten. All I know is, it was my daughter and potentially myself.

My hubby had to check my hair. Who else could? My Mommy lives far away and people aren’t exactly lining up to check for nits in my hair. Although I will say there are actually lice services you can call to help you get rid of lice. He checked my hair while there was a basketball game on. This made me a little skeptical. Was he watching my head, or the game. As an aside, my head is totally itching because of writing about this. He found a few. That was enough. I treated both myself and my daughter with the Nix. Then continued with the olive oil and shower cap, plastic bag treatment for the next week. Because, all it takes is missing one dang nit (egg) for the buggers to come back full throttle. So, I wasn’t going to mess around. This was a week of being exhausted, a douching of my entire household. But, I was thorough. I combed through each little section of my daughter’s hair. Bribed her with many lollipops and we persevered. Our home was lice-free.

I had to tell my daughter’s daycare about the lice. I felt dirty. Turns out everyone in my daughter’s daycare had lice in her class. I found some gross smelling Fairy Tales spray and shampoo and geranium oil that lice supposedly don’t like the smells of to deter any potential lice from jumping back into my daughters curly locks. Poor kid smelled like a bunch of weird herbs and spices, so did her room.

Until this day I rarely have Evie go to PreK with her hair down, and still spray the spray. One day I heard my daughter playing with her dollies. She was playing beauty shop and and she was combing one doll’s hair. I heard her say, “Nope, no bugs”.