This is every parent’s night mare, head lice. Almost every person in the world has either had head lice or knows someone that has had it and we all remember the horror of knowing that these things were living on our heads.
Hearing our mother’s gasps of terror as they combed through every strand of our hair and picking out the nits which in lay terms is the eggs of the lice. I remember one year my sister and I got head lice and got suspended from school until we got rid of them.
The other kids looked at us like we had the plague. This was back in the late 1970′s and with our luck, my sister and I both had very long hair. Our mother and our aunt sat all night with us sitting on the floor between their legs so that they (my aunt and my mother) could search through our hair for the lice and their nits.
After going through this all night, just when we thought that it could not get any worse then out came the lice shampoo! I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called, I think it was Kewellada or something to that effect but it was the most vial smelling concoction that has ever been invented! Surely the lice ran from the smell of this stuff alone!
Now we know that head lice are not disease spreading and are not really dangerous but they are highly contagious and having head lice can be so embarrassing and extremely annoying! When you are bitten by one of these critters it makes your head or scalp very itchy and causes inflammation. Of course when we were younger and our mom would say, “quit scratching, you will only make it worse”. That is so true and it will lead to infections.
There are also the Lice eggs, otherwise known as the nits that a parent has to worry about and look for on their child’s head. These nits are tiny tan, brown or yellow dots that are very difficult to pick out of the hair. After the lice hatch from the egg, the egg turns a whitish color or clear. The lice will lay their eggs on the parts of the hair that is closest to the scalp where the temperature is much warmer and is the perfect temperature for hatching.
These nits will often be mistaken for dandruff but when you run your fingers through the hair, the flakes don’t come out. These eggs will stick and won’t come off simply by shaking the hair. Now unless there are a lot of nits or head lice, it will be more common for the parent to find the nits in the child’s hair than the actual lice crawling on the child’s head. Nits will hatch up to one or two weeks after they have been laid.
Now, we will discuss a little about the baby lice which is called a nymph and the adult which are referred to as a Louse. The adult head lice are not much bigger than a sesame seed and they are a tannish brown in color. The Nymphs are much smaller and will become adult in approximately seven days after they are hatched. Most of the time the lice will nourish themselves from the blood of the host about every four to six hours but they have been known to survive for up to three days on the scalp.
Any School Mom Survival Guide should include instructions on how to locate and kill lice in your kids hair. Now the school board won’t let your children attend unless they are confirmed lice free. I’m digging for information, and next time I’ll have links and more info (maybe even a video) on how to get find and destroy head lice so your kids can get back to school.
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Nicole
School Mom
