They certainly don’t mention this stuff in the baby manual. I have a vague memory of having my hair cut really short, like a boy, when I was about 4… or maybe I was 7… I hated it and I got mocked in school about it. I resented my Mom for having cut my hair so short for ages.
Of course my memory didn’t retain any of the reasons why she might have done something like that. But now that I have kids in school age, I have an inkling as to why.
Miss Z first got head lice when she was in nursery. I went out and bought products, I bought the special comb and I had a crash course on lice from other Moms in her class. What worked, what didn’t work, and last but not least, how much of an effort it was to really keep them at bay.
There seems to be a recurring issue with lice at the school. I don’t know if it boils down to a specific child or children that manage to infect everyone else, or if it’s just something that exists generally, whether we like it or not, as it continually propagates.
The treatments industry certainly doesn’t make it easy on anyone. Every time there’s an occurrence at my house we all have to do the treatment (bar the boys because if they have it we just shave off their hair), so it costs us a fortune. Just last week I spent £17 on a 260ml bottle. Ouch!!
So back to Miss Z. After a couple of times of it happening, and of the challenge it is to comb through her hair with the special comb, given all the screaming and all, I decided to cut her hair. I think she was 4 at the time. I cut it shoulder length which she didn’t seem to be too upset about, and I made sure she understood why I was doing it. It was just too hard to comb through with her long hair.
So I took to the internet to see if I could find tips on how to prevent this from happening. There was the suggestion of the shampoos with tea tree oil which act as a deterrent. We started using those since then and she still got lice. And then I found a suggestion that seems to work.
I can’t tell you it works 100% of the time because since we’ve used this method, there have been some re-occurrence. But what I can say is that the lice episodes seem to coincide with times when either I or the nanny were lapse in using it every day.
The trick is to get a spray bottle (which you can find for about £1 on the high street), fill it with water and then add a few drops of lavender oil. I normally put about 15 drops, but it depends on how big the bottle is.
Then, every morning as we do the kids hair, we shake the bottle and spray the kids’ hair. Apparently the smell of lavender is a strong deterrent for the little b******s.
To make it attractive for the kids, I called it “flower water”, which is fairly accurate… it’s like a perfume for the hair. They sometimes complain that they don’t want their hair wet, but I tell them that the alternative is that I shave their hair off. They quickly stop the complaining and it quickly dries off anyway.
Our new nanny didn’t know the importance of doing it daily, so she didn’t. And I think that’s why Miss Z got it again now. And of course, the nanny and I got it too. Which should be a good enough motivator for remembering the flower water every day for a while 😉