A single louse...

A single adult louse can lay up to 4-10 eggs a day for about 28 days. Which means I could have as few as one or as many as 280 eggs. Yuck! Lice are blood suckers, like mosquitos. Crawling around and eating my head flesh.

These little eggs are attached to the hair with a waterproof, glue-like substance AND they are nearly impossible to see (being the same color as the hair shaft).

At 10 days, the nymph hatches. Leaving behind a yellowish-brown to white egg shell. Nymphs are also nearly impossible to see...and it can't reproduce for 12 days.

So if you do the shampoo, combing, etc. on day one - you kill the lice and some eggs. But for the few eggs you didn't kill, they may now be nymphs and I've got to get them before they start laying eggs. Which means you do it all over again on day 10.

Today is day 10 for Amanda. We will shampoo and comb her tonight.

Friday is Jenn's day 10. I think Darren and I will make a date of it. We'll put the kids to bed, have a glass of wine, a steamy shower and a fine tooth comb. For few hours, it'll be just the 2 of us. And however many lice left that are nearly impossible to see.

Last time, we might have had too much help (this was the day of the "ice storm")...

Katy was our photographer extraordinare...
The other kids were watching Animaniacs...which is fitting, since they probably look a lot like lice.
(I'm not sure what they are.)

But Amanda couldn't leave Emily alone, so she sat on the floor with us for a while...


which might have been the reason Darren put the comb in
his coffee.


Little Claire had to ride it out in her crib.