This year, apparently, it’s my 10-year-old son’s turn. My close-lipped, typically tweenage son who can barely tell me what he did all day, let alone let on when his head itches.
And here’s the kicker: He’s blonde.
Now if you’ve ever dealt with lice, you know what that means. Nits happen to be the exact shade of yellow—dare I say, blonde—as your child’s hair.
But having been through this once before with the brunette, I knew my weapon of choice. No, I didn’t repeatedly douse my three children’s heads with Rid, which contains an active ingredient–piperonyl butoxide–that’s the Environmental Working Group has indicated is a “low hazard” for cancer and reproductive toxicity, but still smells mighty toxic to me.
Although I did shampoo him to kill the critters that I saw crawling on my son’s scalp (plus the rest of the family, proactively), I then got to work with a more natural arsenal: A bottle of tea tree oil, and a fine toothed comb. Every morning for the past three days, I rub tea tree oil on my palms with a little water, then run my fingers around their hairlines—concentrating on the back of the neck and around the ears—to dissuade any stray bugs from trying to take up residence.
And each afternoon I wash their hair with regular shampoo, then sit them down in strong light to go through their hair strand by strand. I haven’t found any nits in my daughter’s dark brown hair, and I’m praying that the quick check of the wiggly Barnacle (read: baby) is thorough enough to confirm the same absence of wigglers of the insect variety, but each time I examine my son, I find a few more tiny—hopefully dead—eggs, which take about 15 minutes to pick out, one by one.
Ugh. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
I dread this kind of infestation. I go crazy washing all the towels and sheets and hats in the house. But the reality is this: I hole up in the bathroom and my son—who usually ducks his head when I try to kiss him goodbye and will only let me hug him if no one else is looking—actually talks to me as I comb through is nit-masking blonde hair.
Yes, gentle readers, I’m using a pest infestation as a means to communicate with my tween. Have I no shame?
I hope that by today, I’ve got them all. But I’ll keep checking in the back-to-school weeks to come. I may not find any more lice, but at least my son and I will have a few days more of decent conversation before the wall of silence goes up again.
What’s your chem.-free method to combat lice and/or communicate with a tween or teen? Tell me about it!
