Head Lice

Ha! Made you itch! You could stop reading right now, and you'd still be itchy. Yep, right there behind your left ear. NO! It's at the nape of your neck!

Sigh. Picked up the Monkey from daycare this morning, after Jabberwock and I had met Dad and Little Sister for waterpark playtime, and I was met with the news that one of the lovely children who attends the daycare has head lice. So, instantly my head is acrawl with phantom parasites. ICK! I checked both kids' heads very carefully. I examined every follicle. Monkey does have about eighteen billion bug bites on his head, but they are very clearly mosquito bites, not head lice bites. So why am I still all itchy?

I've never had lice, and I hope with all of my being that I never do. When I was a kid, we went to the nurse at school, who poked through our hair with little plastic straws and then made this little sound in the back of her throat and sent us along, either to the left or to the right. Nobody knew which line was good news and which was bad, which line led back to spelling tests and music class and which one led to phone calls home and the cry of "cooties" every time you came around until somebody else did something humiliating and earned your spot of ridicule.

I just hope we all end up in the right line this time around (or the left...whichever is lice-free!), and that you never hear another word from me on this subject. I bet you do, too.

Seriously, did you just feel something crawling?