LICE!

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(I've been advised to take off the names all commercial lice remedies for legal reasons. This I have done.)

Welllllllll..... I made this page to pass on some information I have learned when it comes to head lice... I found some on my daughters head at the nape of her neck after she had showered and I had just started brushing her hair... I don't know what made me notice them - you'd think I would have seen them before... For some reason, I saw some areas in her hair that made me think, "oh shoot, she's got lice" (of course, my version of what I was thinking was much more x-rated!)...

How did my daughter get them? She shared a hair tie with someone known to have had head lice many times before (in spite of my warnings not to do so)... It was that easy...

And, let's get one thing straight... Lice is not only for dirty people... I am not the cleanest person in the world, I'll admit that... I have dust bunnies of my own... However, my home and my children are not filthy dirty... So, don't be embarrassed if you find someone in your family has lice... Well, the myth continues that only dirty people get them and it will be a hard fight to get people to realize that anyone can get them... Yup, that means from Bozo the Clown to the President of the United States to you and me...

I've got information on these pages about what I went through to get rid of lice... First things first... Don't believe the instructions on the bottles of lice killers - they don't kill the nits and often times they don't kill the lice either... Why? Because the little critters have become resistant to the poisons in them... Hard to believe but true... So, what worked 20 years ago probably won't work now... You'll have to go back to nit-picking... As I was saying, don't believe the instructions on the bottles... I did just that, with a great sigh of relief I washed everyone's head the first time, washed all the laundry, and figured all was well... Until a week later when I looked in my children's hair and found them infested again... And my one daughter becomes very dizzy and nauseated with the commercial lice products - she was nearly in tears when I said we had to redo her hair again... Boy, talk about guilt!

Update: I got to experiment with a neighbors louse! Her daughter had them and I got one... Poor thing... Anyway, I put it into a blob of the [lice killer] shampoo for over 10 minutes... At first it acted as if it were drowning, you know, moving it's legs all over and thrashing it's body about... Then, I rinsed it off with water... It laid there for a few minutes and then began to crawl around! I got some pictures of it... I put hair dye (medium-brown) on it, vinegar, ammonia, soap, and even detergent for washing clothes... Not one of them killed it... Just an FYI to all of you out there who think doing vinegar rinses will help! I found one louse that took a while to die in bleach but the rest died almost immediately.

UPDATE: UGH! Four years after getting lice the first time which prompted me to make this set of webpages we got lice again! Well, rather, my 6 year old who is now in kindergarden did. She is the only one I found the little buggers on though everyone got treated "just in case". It is now Jan. 2004. I whipped out my video camera this time and filmed them. Please see the Videos of Lice page. I'm very upset about her getting these damn bugs! I don't know of any way to prevent my kids from getting them (no, teetree oil does not work) other than to put a plastic cap on their heads or shaving all their hair off and making them bald. Very frustrating!

I live in fear that we'll get lice again (see above, we got them again)... It was a lot of work to get rid of them... A lot of work... Some websites tell you you don't need to go nuts when it comes to cleaning... Sorry, but I did... I could not get rid of them until I went and cleaned every corner of my home... I don't know where they were hiding but I finally got rid of them... And, when you have children that seem to crawl in the most obscure places you'd never think they would go into, you can be rest assured that if there is one pregnant louse in your home it will wind up in your childs hair...

UPDATE: I"ve found that changing the bed sheets every day, vacuuming the house and furniture, using cream rinse (yes, that stuff you use after you wash your hair) and nit-picking at least every other day (I did it every day) is what works... Nit-picking is the key - gross as it may sound - to getting rid of the lice quickly... When I first discovered lice on my children I scrubbed the house - not one surface went unchecked, not one piece of clothing went unwashed, not one piece of cloth furniture went without a thorough vacuuming and/or without being ironed... I was determined to get rid of them and went on alot of misinformation from friends and the internet... I now have (unfortunately) gained quite a lot of experience since my first horrified discovery of the critters and in gaining that experience I have discovered ways to get rid of them... A tired "Yippeee" is about all I can muster...

I also have pictures I have taken of my daughters hair with nits in it and I have taken pictures of a little louse in a sink as it crawled along a hair... So, continue on and learn... Learn how I got rid of the lice and see what a louse really looks like if you have never seen one before (they can be the size of a grain of rice and larger if you don't find them early enough - you'd be surprised as to how big they can get)...

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Here are all the links to the BubblyBabs Lice pages:

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