lousy
[lou-zee]
adjective
1. infested with lice.
2. Informal
a. mean or contemptible: That was a lousy thing to do.
b. wretchedly bad; miserable: a lousy job; I feel lousy.
We had a lousy weekend around here. By every definition of the word.
You would think as homeschoolers we’d be less likely to catch head lice. But we have a dozen neighborhood kids who all go to different schools and bring whatever viruses and infestations they encounter there with them when they visit our moppets. Including the dreaded lice.
So in short, we spent Sunday and Monday delousing our household. (“Delousing” is one of my new favorite words. It’s just so descriptive.)
Can I just tell you how disgusting it is to comb hundreds of lice and their eggs out of your kids’ hair? BoyWonder only had one lone louse on his little head. The girls, on the other hand, were a breeding ground for an entire civilization. I’m pretty sure those little buggers were forming governments and building shopping malls on both of their heads.
Yes. Eeeewwww.
Havarti and I picked each other over like a couple of orangutans at the zoo. We each found a few, just enough to be thoroughly grossed out and totally motivated to annihilate every last one of those things and their unborn children with an all-out assault, using weapons of mass destruction.
Or at least a non-toxic lice treatment from Walgreens.
You really only have to treat once, but we treated twice for good measure. Plus, we got the special homeopathic shampoo to prevent reinfestation. (Now, there’s a pretty word.) Plus, to make sure we thoroughly deloused the house, we washed everything that possibly could be thrown into the washer on hot, and dried everything that couldn’t be washed, on hot.
Burn, little suckers, burn.
And then, naturally, I did what any good homeschooling mother would do in this situation.
I pulled one of those tiny dead buggers from my moppet’s head, stuck it to a slide, and shoved it under a microscope.
As gross as a louse is to the naked eye, it’s ten times grosser under a microscope.
And since we’ve now turned this into an educational adventure, here are a few factoids about the nasty little louse:
– Lice have (most likely) been around since the beginning of recorded time.
– There’s no more likelihood of any economic group catching lice than any other. (It’s not about the money, money, money . . . lice don’t need your money, money money . . . they just want to make the woooorld itch . . . by plantin’ eggs on yoooour head . . .) If you don’t know that song, that probably doesn’t make sense. (It ain’t about the . . . ba-bling, ba-bling, it ain’t about the . . . cha-ching, cha-ching . . .) If you do know that song, you’re welcome for getting it stuck in your head. 🙂 At least you don’t have lice.
– African Americans are far less likely to catch head lice than other ethnic groups. About 10 percent of non-African-American kids will catch lice at some point, while only 1/2 of one percent of African-American kids will. Interesting, no?
– Lice do not have hind legs with which they can hop or jump. They also do not have wings, so they cannot fly. (You wouldn’t think they’d be so easy to catch. All that family snuggling in the morning has its price.)
– Hygiene has nothing to do with catching or not catching lice. You can have the cleanest house and the cleanest kid known to humanity, and they’ll still catch it if their head comes in contact with an infected kid. (It sure makes you feel dirty, though.)
– Lice can live 24 hours underwater, so plain old washing has no effect on them.
– You can suffocate lice by coating your head with olive oil and letting it sit, then combing out the buggers and the nits (eggs) with a lice comb. And vinegar can help loosen the nit glue (yuck) that holds the eggs in place.
– Lice are gross. (Not technically a fact, but true nonetheless.)
– Even if you don’t have lice, just hearing about or reading about lice will automatically make your head itch. (Not technically a fact, either. But I bet it’s true.)
You’re itching right now, aren’t you?
Just sharing the love, folks. 🙂
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Comments 2
The one about African Americans getting it less HAS to be true considering that one of your moppets slept in the bed of one of my mookies with said lice in full bloom and we are not at all lousy over here. Sorry for your struggle.
It is absolutely true that is is random. I remember being totally grossed out and doing everything you wrote about. But with only one of my children. It is true that mothers love all of their children equally but lice definitely have favorites.