Know your enemy: head lice

Head lice - the little creatures who decide to invade your little treasure's hair within a week of returning to school after the holidays. They are relentless little buggers who are indiscriminate in their choice of who to attack next. 

At our house, we once spent the whole of the six-weeks summer break successfully ridding ourselves of them, only for us to have to dodge another potential attack within two days of going back to school in September. Our then 6-year old daughter caught them off a certain child of a certain family (probably) at school during the last week of term. It was the first time we'd ever had them. I hadn't even had them myself as a child, and it was awful to think of my own child getting them. We tried one treatment, which was a faff. It was one where you left it on overnight, which was a real pain. Asking a six-year-old not to touch their hair while in bed and not to roll about too much is asking a bit much. I dared not even suggest trying it on my 3 year old. 

The nanny was un-fazed. She had worked with children for over ten years. She had caught every bug going, including the hair variety. I felt a bit bad that she also caught them off my child this time too, until I found a mahoosive one in my own hair - aaaarrrrrggh! Be gone you horrible multi-legged little git! I only found the one, but it was ginormous. You could see every one of it's wriggly legs. For about three weeks, the nanny and I were continually conditioning our hairs and combing through, in a combined act of defiance. 

So the nanny went to the shops and bought a better treatment. One that you applied before shampooing. It was excellent. We did everyone's hair and crossed our fingers. The solution was Full Marks. You apply it to dry hair, leave it for a few minutes, comb through and then shampoo. Then you do another treatment a week or two later. 

It worked! Just in time to go back to school for the start of the new year. Now we use Vosene nit-repellent kids shampoo religiously, and it seems to be working. We have had no more repeat attacks. Although it could also be because a certain child from a certain family has moved to another school. I still find myself itching though whenever we get 'the note' from school in one of the book-bags.

Facts about head-lice

• Nits are the eggs of head-lice. Nits take about a week to hatch and become fully-fledged head-lice
• Head-lice develop to the colour of the host's hair - which is why they can be hard to spot (for the record, all of our head-lice were ginger, which was a bit freaky).
• They can live in any type of hair, including clean or dirty.
• They are easily spread by direct contact with others - hence why school is an excellent breeding ground.
• To get rid of them, you should treat everyone in the household at the same time, and wash anything that could be contaminated, like bed linen and towels.
• They need human-blood to survive, so will not survive for long in other places, like on an animal, or a sofa.

By Sergeant J

This is not a sponsored post. I just found the above products to be a great weapon against the wriggly hair-nit army. 

If you like this, please sign up to follow our blog, and leave us a comment or two - we love them!