Our bombardment with plagues continues and this week it’s LICE! (Faints)
I have heard many parents and students from school talking about the major lice epidemic we seem to be having and after reading such a post on Facebook the other morning, I saw a critter crawl out of Rosemary’s hair right as she was about to board the school bus!!! Instant panic mode! Have you seen my hair?!? It’s fingertip length! Have you seen Hub’s hair? He looks like Hagrid! Lavender also has hip length hair. Lice in a family of longhairs is nothing short of disaster!
We’ve all seen and heard the lice killing nightmares. Months and months of chemical treatments, combing, house scouring… And they keep coming back! Why? Because the chemicals don’t work very well. They may or may not kill all the lice (they’ve built up resistance to the chemicals) and they don’t do much of anything for the nits that will hatch in two weeks time, perpetuating the infestation. There is only one sure fire way to get rid of a lice infestation. You need to manually remove each and every critter and nit from each individual strand of hair on your head. Every. Single. One. It is a major undertaking and requires a keen eye for detail. But the good news is, it doesn’t involve any chemical treatments and if done properly you will be completely lice free in a matter of hours, not months! To me, that’s priceless!
I didn’t want to mess around trying home treatments or trusting my untrained eye to catch everything… (Or trusting Hubs eyes to do MY hair). I immediately started searching the net for a local delousing salon and found one that not only had been used and recommended by a friend the week prior, but had the best Yelp reviews and a 30 day lice free guarantee. I considered trying one of the mobile companies but went with the better reviews, longer guarantee and peace of mind knowing the critters would be coming off somewhere other than my home.
Lice Knowing You. They have locations in a few states, and two locations in Portland. They are super clean and extremely efficient. They thoroughly check your entire family (it’s a big process if you have a lot of hair) then treat those they find positive for lice. The head checks take 5-20min per person depending on your hair and what they find. The treatments take 30min – 2+hrs depending on your hair and level of infestation. They need to check and/or treat all family members (and caregivers) in the same 24hr period or you will not qualify for the 30 day guarantee. And then all treated people have to go back a few days later for a final check. They are REALLY strict about the time parameters to qualify for the guarantee!
It turned out that despite my horrendous itching (and absolute certainty that I had hundreds of lice colonies living in my hair) and our family’s very close knit habits of daily snuggling in bed and sharing of hair accessories, Rosemary was the only one with lice! Wooohoooo! For now… But thanks to the CDC decision a couple years ago to no longer exclude lice infested children from schools, I fear we will be back to this salon in the coming years.
Lice suck! And the CDC sucks for allowing lousy kids to remain in school and spread everything! I swear, between all the plagues we’ve had in our household over the past two school years (caught AT school), I am tempted to move us into a bubble in some Alaskan outpost and computer school the girls! …or maybe I’ll just start a hazmat suit style trend.
Oh no! You’re lucky to have escaped with only 1 long hair affected. I was imagining all of you with short hair. ? Thanks for the tip – I didn’t know delousing salons existed. Good to know since my little guy starts preschool this year.
I wish you guys luck, Poro! They DO exist and they are awesome! Expensive, but worth it.
Wow, time flies! Preschool =o)!