I am going to humble myself and tell you about our chaotic experience last week of bugs in Taryn's hair.
I imagine that when I say bugs & hair in the same sentence you automatically assume, as I did, LICE!!! That dreaded word, the dreaded stigma. Taryn had come in from outside three days in a row complaining that her head itched -- her hair was practically standing on end she was itching so much. The first two days I told her she was sweaty -- the third day I checked her out -- and my heart stopped -- I could see little black things the size of pencil dots moving all through her hair. Let me just say -- NASTY!!
So I freak, as any good mom would, and go into overdrive. "We need to go to the doctor. We can't touch anything. We need to move out of our house." And then I call my mom!
After I collect myself, I drive Taryn to the doctor and as I pull into the clinic, I decide to just call them from the parking lot. "Seriously," I thought, "do I have to go in there and pay the co-pay to find out what I already know...bugs in the hair equals lice." So from the parking lot I talked to the nurse on-call and she told me everything I needed to do. It was a list that ended just before move out of your house and after -- "Don't worry, you will eventually get rid of them and if everything I said fails you could try olive oil in her hair for 8 hours a day, 3 days in a row." (I'm not kidding.)
So I come home like an army general shouting orders to my troops. "Put all your stuffed animals and pillows in these plastic bags, pull ALL of your bedding off, goop up your hair with this gunk, throw away your brushes." I comb tediously through every ones hair and discover nothing on anyone but Taryn. Which was encouraging, but surprising. I fell into bed that night to the luxurious accommodations of a sleeping bag and a new pillow that Cal purchased for the whopping expense of $3.49.
I hardly slept.
The next morning I continued with the literal mountain of laundry. I called the school first thing and told them I needed to report a case of head lice in the Kindergarten class. I don't care what they say -- admitting you have bugs in your hair is humiliating.
I then call a friend who I know has been through this mess before and her encouraging words to me were "Ohhhh Shoot! I'm sorry." (It actually was a little harsher than that :)). She told me how important it was to get every nit off of the hair shaft and that she literally went through 10 hairs at a time to remove them all. She also described what she saw. And all of a sudden I realize that what she is describing is not at all what I saw in Taryn's hair. I get on the Internet and start doing research -- and what I am seeing pictured, is not what I experienced. So I google "dot size black bugs" and wouldn't you know -- some ladies blog comes up about these swarms of minuscule bugs that she thought were lice, but weren't. She begins to describe how they discovered the source of the bugs was a birds nest above their car.
The bells go off in my head. We have a bird's nest under our deck on a support beam. Every single day Taryn goes and lays down with her forehead on our deck to peek through the floor cracks and check on the baby birds. She loves to see them opening their mouths wide for food. So I go out to our deck and lay a magazine down on the floor right above the birds nest. Instantly it is covered with these dot-sized bugs.
I quickly call the school -- "Stop the presses -- a note announcing a lice infestation in the Kindergarten is not necessary. It's just bird mites!" Then I call Cal -- "You must come home. You have some baby birds to kill" (However, he couldn't kill the baby birds -- he's such a softy. He propped them by a tree in the back field behind our house. Now they will likely starve to death instead. But I love him for trying.) And the bugs easily washed away!
Thus ends our bug story. The only good thing about it is that all of my bedding and comforters have been cleaned. And I learned that crazy ladies blogging about crazy things comes in handy!
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