LOL.........Ah, lice...........yeah....................

When I was a kid, lice was associated with "the worst type" of people. What a laugh!!! Basically though I never thought about them for most of my life and still believed the myth. Then we had kids and got into foster care. I'm not even going to tell you about the first time one of our foster kids was discovered with lice because it was really ridiculous.......we cleaned everything and everybody....LOL!!

Lice have become a common problem in schools and Karen and I could write a book on our experiences. At one point I was ready to buy stock in Nix since we were undoubtedly there biggest customer. The info at the Mayo site is good and as others have said, they dislike "goo" in general and we too had some success with Tea Tree as a preventative. The irony of lice is that they love straight clean hair, not filthy hair....way too gooey for them. It is also MUCH easier to work with short hair.....which leads to my first story.

One of our girls had VERY LONG (waist length) hair and she was a lice magnet. No matter what we tried or how often, nothing worked. At that time we had 6 kids in the house and NONE of them (including her sister) ever had a problem, but "A" really did....We just couldn't stop the damn things! The long thick hair was the real problem because it was frankly impossible to get the nits no matter how hard we tried. Poor "A"......We'd have her showering and treating her hair every three days and then Karen or I going through the hour+ long process of combing through it........Still, she had lice.

Something you probably don't know, but one rule in foster care is that you cannot cut a child's hair without the parent's permission. They are still the parent and as many decisions as possible are always left with them to maintain some degree of their own parental involvement while in foster care. "A" had a mother who wouldn't hear of cutting her hair! The fact that her Mom wasn't even making the visits and the kids visited Grandma and Aunts instead finally allowed the agency to get Grandma's approval and we had her hair cut. "A" loved it and it was really cute.........and within three weeks we had done away with the lice, never to return.

The other story is about a training session we were at. Foster parents are required many hours of training every year to maintain the license. Karen and I were taking a class for 6 hours of credit on dealing with the kids when they came back from parental/home visits. This affects some kids a lot and they all react in different ways......I could do a book on this one.......and what happens when they return can have serious effect on the entire foster family. Anyway, there were about 35 or so of us in the class and the trainer was trying to elicit some anecdotal info about how kids react. She said, "C'mon now......Tell me.....When your kids go home for visits, what things do they bring back?" And from the back of the room came a woman's voice....."Lice."............The entire group just fell apart in laughter because it was so often true.

Spaw