"Hosting" (Part 1)

It's my Birthday week. So at the very least our visitors timing left something to be desired. But after 3 rounds of notes coming home from one of the kid's class with the cheerful message, "Someone in your class has lice!" I wondered how long we'd make it before our luck ran out.
Click, click, click, BANG.

There are so many moments in motherhood that you never forget:
The first time you hold your child in your arms.
The first time they head off for school.
The first time you find lice crawling in their hair.

This morning I discovered one of my children had become a host to some unwelcome guests.
In my horror I immediately used a life line and called a friend. She-who-shall-remain-unamed recently endured the same trauma with her kiddos. She was calm and collected and told me exactly what to buy and how to proceed. Our heads started itching like mad just from the conversation.

It took me 2+ hours to clean and comb through Ground Zero Child's hair. It was highly memorable, but more in the "remember to work through this with my psychiatrist" kind of way. I'm treating all of us even though no one else (yet) has any signs of it. I want to minimize a reoccurrence since, in the words of Sweet Brown, "Ain't nobody got time for dat!"
Before today I had no idea that terms like "lousy" and "nit-picking" were so nasty and insulting.
They say you learn something new everyday. I feel certain I could've done without this knowledge. On the bright side, I'm extremely grateful we sprung for the large capacity washer/dryer.
Good. Grief.

Love in the Time of Lice (Part 2)

After 7+ hours on my feet treating and combing through all 5 of the children's hair (and finding nothing, thankfully, other than the initial discovery) Nathan and I had finally gotten the laundry started and the children down to bed.
Though we were bone-tired we still had to treat each others hair.
Now I don't know about you but when I was falling in love and imagining Nathan and I's grand life together, I never could have conjured the scene we found ourselves in that night.
After an extremely exhausting day, watching my husband part, comb, and search through my wet hair like a mama chimpanzee, both of us without shirts, in the garish light of the reading lamp we'd brought in to help with the inspection, culminated in about the most unflattering reflections I could ever hope to see of the two of us.
At one point Nathan got my long hair hopelessly tangled in the de-lousing comb, and I mean hopelessly. As  he held up the giant mess of hair and comb from the back of my head, he shrugged his shoulders and said "Sorry!" in the best Gilly impression ever, and suddenly we were both laughing hysterically.

Later that night as we got ready to end one of my least favorite days of parenthood yet, I reflected on what true love is.
I want to teach my children that when they are looking for their future spouse that sheesh, there is so much more to consider than just "love". You have to choose someone you not only want to share your best times with but someone who you want to go through the very worst and hardest things in life with.
It's like picking a partner for the Amazing Race. You are gonna see some unforgettable things and have some breathtaking experiences. But there will also be times of disappointment, frustration, functioning through mind bending jet lag, and stress enough to test the strongest relationships. So the question is, who do you want to go on that journey with?
Who do you want delousing your head? And better yet, who could you actually laugh hysterically with in the middle of the whole sordid experience? Because that my friends, is true love.

Anyway, if all of this talk of lice has your head itching like crazy, I have just one word: "Sorry!"