Lord of the Flies (10/7/2010)

Really that should be “Lady of the Lice” if you want an accurate picture of just what has been going on in our house over the past week and a half.  You see, last Monday Mommy was innocently sitting in the parking lot of Maddie’s school, waiting to pick her up when she got a call on her cell phone.  The display read Pflugerville ISD which always has Mommy wondering “What has Maddie done this time.”  It was the nurse.  Now just to give you some back history here, last year Maddie decided at 2:15 pm that she didn’t feel good and needed to go to the nurse.  It seems she had one of those mysterious fevers…you know, the one that registers 100.4 long enough for the school nurse to see it and say Maddie can’t come back to school for 24 hours, yet magically disappears 2 seconds after returning home, leaving Mommy stuck with a perfectly healthy kid the next day.  So when Mommy heard the nurse on the other end, she was convinced Maddie was pulling a repeat of last year.  Well, it was Mommy’s lucky day.  Maddie wasn’t sick.  She had something even better.  Lice.

A couple of days before, Mommy found Maddie madly itching her head.  She did what any good Mommy would do and dug through her hair looking for those nasty little critters.  Not that she really had any clue what she was looking for, but she found nothing.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  But she did talk to Maddie about what she was looking for.  And Maddie, being the “good listener” that she is, mistook the word “lice” for “flies.” 

Fast forward to Monday when Maddie gets into the car.  She was excited (yes, you read that right, excited!) that she had the flies in her hair.  Seems she wasn’t the only one in the class to have them.  Several other girls were treated over the weekend, so Maddie was now able to join this exclusive “flies” club.  She was part of the “In Crowd.”  

Unfortunately, Mommy did not see the joy in Maddie being so “cool,” because while Maddie’s status in her class was being elevated, poor Mommy was being beat down day by day as she was buried under mounds of laundry and house cleaning chores (not to mention all the shampooing and combing of someone’s hair) that come along with a house infested with lice.  She even turned on me and doused me in that foul smelling hair shampoo.
Life seems to have returned to normal somewhat, although if we aren’t careful, Mommy will appear out of nowhere wielding her metal lice comb.  I just hope for all our sakes the “flies” don’t return.