Witches' brew

These last two weeks have not been good ones at our house. I'm stressed and exhausted from fighting the lice. G is tired of having her head inspected and her hair pulled with a metal comb. It's blazing hot and our air conditioning is broken, and the fleas, which I'd gotten under control before this whole lice thing started, have come back with a vengeance and covered me in itchy bites. (They don't seem interested in biting G, which is good for her, but for me, not so much.) Add in the overwrought mixture of preteen girl hormones and grown-up lady hormones that's constantly swirling in the atmosphere around here, and you have a recipe for disaster.

We really need a vacation -- a few days with a lot less laundry and cleaning and a lot more A/C -- but I haven't got either the time or the money for that right now, so we've just got to struggle along and try not to bite each other's heads off too often. Someone send popsicles and electric fans ASAP, pls.

Roll on winter

10 Things About Summer That Make Me Grumpy

by Vanessa, age 37 3/4

1. Sweat
2. Sweat in my bra
3. Crowds full of other people's sweaty bodies
4. Shirtless guys with back hair and scary-looking moles and pimples everywhere
5. Always having a headache from the heat
6. Too much damn shaving
7. Not being able to sleep
8. Feeling greasy all over
9. An excess of bugs
10. Being so hot I feel like throwing up

I am so retiring to Seattle or England or someplace else where it's always cool and rainy. Ugh.

Lice and how to find them

One thing I've learned from the Lice Crisis is that lice are not as easy to spot as you might think. I brush G's hair for her every morning and help her rinse it in the shower, and I still didn't notice the little buggers until they were practically doing the samba on her scalp, mostly because I didn't know what to look for.

A few real-life friends have asked me this week how they would know if their child had lice, and since I've become an unwilling expert, I thought I would share a few tips for finding and removing them:

- Lice themselves are tiny, fast-moving brown bugs with a lot of legs. You probably won't see them in regular lamplight or indoor light. I finally found them on G by looking at her head under bright morning sunlight.

- Nits are tiny sesame-seed-shaped objects that are attached to one side of a single strand of hair. They're either yellowish brown or white/clear, depending on whether they've hatched or not. You'll find most of them around the hairline, especially behind the ears and at the back of the neck, but they're not limited to those locations, so be sure to look everywhere when you're picking.

- Nits are also glued onto the hair and either have to be combed out or pulled out individually with your fingernails. If you can brush it off or blow it away, it's not a nit.

- Plastic nit combs are crap. Buy a metal one. I got one from CVS that has two interchangeable combs, an attached magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers and a cleaning brush for about $10. I also bought the electronic RobiComb, but it only works on live lice and I'd already eradicated all of those by the time I started using it, so I can't vouch for how well it works.

- Combing will get a lot of the nits out, but nowhere near all. To get the stragglers, you have to pick. Make sure you actually verify that the nit has been removed (you can wipe it off on a wet paper towel) because sometimes they'll slide all the way down to the end of the hair strand and then stick there. Conditioner helps with this part.

- If your kid has thick hair like G does, you will need to section it off with clips while you pick. I've been clipping it up the way hairstylists do at salons and working on the underneath layers first, then the top ones.

Moving on, I only found four nits during this evening's session, and all but one of them were dead/empty, so I think we're winning the war, or at least this skirmish. I'm pretty sure I'll never use the terms "nitpicking" or "going through it with a fine-tooth comb" quite so blithely again, though. And given what I do for a living, I use them both a lot.

You dirty rotten louse

I got so paranoid about having caught G's lice that yesterday I did the smothering treatment on myself as a preventative measure, only with olive oil because a reader had mentioned that it was less smelly and easier to wash out than mayonnaise. I tell you what, there is nothing better for your hair than saturating it in extra-virgin olive oil for two hours. I may or may not have lice, but my hair looks like a goddamn shampoo commercial. So soft! So shiny! So smooth!

In other news, I've discovered that nothing makes you feel more like a primate than sitting and picking vermin out of your little ape's hair. We've done almost 10 hours of picking over the last three days, and I'm still finding a few nits every time I inspect her head, although there are very few now and a lot of them are the dead, empty ones. She's been remarkably patient about this, especially considering how much she hates to have her hair brushed or even touched, and I've rewarded her patience lavishly with ice-cream cones and video games and new DVDs. She's watched Shaun the Sheep: Sheep on the Loose about 15 times since we bought it on Tuesday. Hey, whatever gets us through this, right?

As I wash and pick and comb and vacuum, I'm torn between wishing that P were here to help (and to check my hair for me, OMG) and being glad for his sake that he isn't. I'm pretty clean, but P was almost pathological about it, especially toward the end of his life when it was one of the few things left he could control, and I don't think he would have been able to bear the horror of lice on his child or in his home. He would either have made himself sick with mopping and scrubbing, or he would have done something crazy and desperate like dunking G's head in kerosene, or both. I'd still like to have him here for the emotional support, though. I'm really a very selfish person at heart. Sigh.

Anyway, I have about a million more loads of laundry left to do, I need to vacuum out the inside of the car, and I'll be doing head checks every day for the next two weeks, but I think we may be past the worst of it. I called my mother this evening and begged her to come over on Saturday and inspect me for nits, and she said she would; if that's all clear, hopefully we can resume some semblance of normal life soon. I'm so ready.

I'm in hell

G has been scratching her head a lot for the last week or so, but repeated checks of her scalp revealed nothing until today, when the bright morning sunlight clearly showed BUGS. Yes. Lice. We dodged the bullet back in May when she was exposed at a Girl Scout event, but her friend "Jenny" had them a few days before school ended, and I imagine that's where she got them. Aaargh.

Anyway, cue me calling in to work and then coating G's head in mayonnaise, scrubbing the mayo out in the shower, spending THREE HOURS going through her thick, thick hair with a nit comb, and then stripping every sheet, blanket, rug and pillow from her room to be washed. We're both exhausted, the cats are traumatized and the bathroom smells like a bowl of potato salad that's been left too long in the sun, but on the plus side, the itching that was tormenting her this morning is completely gone.

As for me, I keep feeling as if things with too many legs are crawling all over me, but I think it's psychosomatic because G and I don't share brushes or towels or any of the things that might be vectors for infestation, and also I just had my hair professionally colored on Saturday, which would have killed any creepy-crawlies dead. I wish I could get someone to inspect my head, just to make me feel 100-percent safe, but it's really not something I would ask a friend, even a close one, to do. The dreaded lice check is pretty much a job that only your mother can or should perform.

That time of year

This month brought both the third anniversary of P's death, on July 2, and our thirteenth wedding anniversary, on July 6. I cannot tell you how much I wish those events did not fall so close together, but they do. Nothing for it but to suck it up and deal.

I have more to say, but for now I'll leave you with a very early photo of me and P, taken about two years before we got married. This photo usually sits on my desk at work, and every time I look at it, I'm shocked at how young we are in it -- only twenty-two (me) and twenty-four (him). We grew up together, and that's an experience you can have only once in a lifetime.

I'm glad I had it with him.

Success

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may recall my campaign to make G into a fearless air traveler and not a white-knuckled one like me. I've taken her on three flights in the last 11 months (two of them cross-country), using every skill I learned in my college acting classes to appear confident and carefree instead of scared shitless, and now I know it was worth it.

How, you ask?

Because today she turned to me and said, "I think I might be a flight attendant when I grow up."

OMG! I thought. Aloud, I said, "Well, it would be cool to travel to a lot of places."

"Yeah," she said dreamily, "and I'd get to walk all around the plane while it was in the air." Then she paused and said "When can we go someplace on a plane again, Mom? I want to fly."

I win at life! All right, just for today, but still, I win!

On the bad-parent side of the coin, I introduced G to Monty Python's Lumberjack Song yesterday. She thought it was hysterical and has been going around singing "I chop down trees, I wear high heels, suspenders and a BRAAAA" all day. I suppose I should feel guilty about this, but it's my responsibility to introduce her to the classics, right? It's just like when I read her Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and taught her how to play "Ode to Joy" on the piano. Only not.

Secret ingredient

It's 7:30 in the morning and I'm making G's breakfast while she waits at the table ...

G: How do you make the cinnamon toast taste so good?
Me: Must be all the love I put in it.

(pause)

G: Thank you for the love, Mom.

Spirits of earth and air

April 16, 2008:

So the other night (Thursday, I think) I woke up at about 1 a.m. because I had heard someone call my name, loud and close by, as if they were trying to wake me up. I looked around, but obviously there wasn't anyone there, so I went back to sleep.

A little while after that, I woke up again, and as I opened my eyes, I saw something over my bed in the dark, probably two feet above me and the same distance in front of me. I described it as an irregular circle to someone the next day, but it wasn't really round enough to be a circle -- almost a kite shape, but more circular than that. (Vague, I know, but I only saw it for a few seconds and it's been a while since then.) It wasn't very big, and I had a distinct impression that it was flat. It had a glow to it, and there were colors within the glow, green and blue, like the colors you see in an opal.

I was in the process of sitting up in bed as I woke up -- it felt like coming up through water toward the surface -- and as I sat up and got closer to whatever-it-was, it flew backward away from me, as if it were being pulled on a string. (If you've ever had a floater in your eye, it was a bit like that, the way they drift off to the side of your vision as you try to look at them.) By the time I was sitting all the way up, it was gone.

It wasn't a frightening experience -- I just lay down again and thought about it for a minute or two before turning over and going back to sleep -- but it was very odd. I don't really believe in ghosts (I don't not believe in them, but I don't have any real proof they exist, either) but it was almost enough to make me think I'd been visited by some sort of spirit.

Dec. 2, 2008:

... Maybe six months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a strange, kite-shaped glowing object hovering over me, glowing with half a dozen opalescent colors. I saw it for a split second and then it flew backward and disappeared. I had forgotten about it until last night, when I had a similar experience.

The last time this happened, I had gone to bed fairly late and hadn't been asleep very long, and I woke up because I heard someone say my name. This time, I had also gone to bed late, but I don't know what woke me, only that I opened my eyes and this thing was directly in front of my face. It wasn't solid like the last time, but made up of dozens or hundreds of tiny red and green lights. They were connected in a vaguely spherical shape by strands of something I couldn't quite see, and the overall effect was of a tangled bundle of Christmas-tree lights. I saw it and I said out loud, as if I were answering a question someone had asked me while I was sleeping, "It's because you aren't here. I wouldn't do it if you were here." Whatever-it-was then flew backward over my head and (I assume) disappeared through the headboard of the bed. I looked at the clock -- it was 1:41 a.m. -- and then I calmly went back to sleep and didn't think about it again until I was in the shower this morning.

Time to lay off the crack, eh?

April 20, 2009:

Twice in the past I've written about waking up shortly after falling asleep to see glowing/lighted objects hanging just over my bed. Well, last night my subconscious took it to a new level, because I saw an actual person in front of me. I had fallen asleep about half an hour before, and as I started to wake up I saw a young man (maybe in his early twenties) with short, dark blond or light brown hair, holding something in his hands. He wasn't transparent by any means, but he clearly wasn't solid either, if that makes any sense. I woke up and sat up at the same time, with that coming-up-through-water feeling I've had before, and I tried to grab at him, but he was moving away from me, and my hands went through him. By the time I was sitting all the way up, he was gone and I was fully awake. I looked over at the clock and saw that it was 1:22 a.m. ...

... I know it must have been a dream, but it wasn't like a dream at all because there wasn't any plot preceding it -- he wasn't a character in a dream I was having, he was just there as I woke up. If anything, it was like I woke up because I knew he was there and wanted to get a better look at him, or possibly at what he was holding.

I hadn't been bothered by the two glowing-light experiences, but this one did disturb me a bit -- I wasn't frightened, just a little freaked out because well, I thought I'd seen a stranger in my room. But I was really tired, so after a couple of minutes I just shrugged and went back to sleep. I told my dad about it when he called earlier this evening, and he said I should write it all down and turn it into a best-selling novel. He would say that. :)

April 25, 2009:

... Also, here's something that I have to admit freaked me out a bit. Last Saturday, I had that strange experience, and today, I found out that my mother's youngest brother had died unexpectedly a couple of days before it happened. The last time I saw him, 25 years ago, he was about the age of the young man I saw in my dream, and looked similar, with light hair. But the really spooky bit is that it turns out a few months ago, he had lost the fingers from his right hand in an accident and was deeply depressed about it. I had thought the man I saw/dreamt of/whatever was showing me something in his cupped hands, but maybe what he was showing me was his hands themselves -- that they had been restored and were whole. I generally consider myself to be a skeptic, but sometimes it's hard to be one when weird things like this happen.

Discuss ...

Rollercoaster

I've been all over the place today. I woke up in a strange, reckless state of mind and left home wondering if I was going to say or do something I would regret later. Next I got some kudos and a possible opportunity that put me in a great mood, and then along came an unexpectedly large expense that made me want to tear my hair out. It's getting close to midnight and I still don't know whether to categorize the day as good or bad. Plus, I still feel weird and jittery, as if something big is about to happen. It makes me nervous.

Also today, I got proof positive that I am completely oblivious to other people. When I went downstairs to get lunch, one of the chef guys asked me "Were you at [name of shopping plaza] last weekend?" I said "Yeah, on Saturday night," and he said "I thought so. I was there to see Star Trek, and I saw you sitting on a bench outside and thought 'Hey, I know her,' but I didn't want to bother you."

I said that I had been there to see a movie too and we chatted about what we'd both watched for a few seconds, and then I walked away with my burrito feeling like the most unobservant person on the planet. Not only did I not see this guy on Saturday (I was waiting for a friend and had my nose stuck in a magazine), but if I had, I never would have made the connection that person at the movie theater = person from the café at work, unless someone pointed it out. And yet he somehow managed to recognize me out of context, at a distance, and in the dark no less. Either he's some sort of super-secret super-spy, or I go around completely lost in my own world all the time. I'm thinking it's probably the latter.

And on a final, vermin-related note, I found out that both of our cats have fleas and that G was probably exposed to head lice during her Girl Scout troop's sleepover last weekend. My skin is crawling just thinking about it, especially the lice part -- I've made it through 10 years of parenting without ever having to deal with lice, and I don't want to start now. I already dosed the cats up with Capstar and Frontline, so they should be fine, but lice ... ewwwwwwwww. The girl with the lice is a lot younger and she and G didn't really hang out or sleep near each other, so hopefully we've escaped the scourge. Only time will tell.

Joe Cool

At the dinner table last night:

Me: Who did you play with at recess today?
G: Um, Mom, I don't exactly "play" at recess anymore.
Me: What do you do instead?
G: I hang out.

Survey says

1. How old were you when you started walking or biking to some places (e.g. school or a friend's place) on your own? What were the circumstances?)

I was allowed to play outside on my own starting at about age 7. I started walking to school alone after we moved to Houston, when I was nine and in fourth grade. Around the same time, I also started walking to the park by myself, and I remember very clearly being allowed to walk to the Stop 'n Go down the street for the first time. (I bought a candy bar and a Richie Rich comic book. Good times.)

2. How old were you when you started taking public transit on your own? What were the circumstances?

I started taking the public bus to school at the beginning of ninth grade, so I would have been 13, almost 14. I went to school in another city, and it was quite a long trip -- 45 minutes on two buses.

3. How old were you when you first took a long-distance trip (unaccompanied on the bus, train, or plane, even if you were met at your destination) on your own? What were the circumstances?

I don't think I ever did this as a child. I do remember that when we lived in Houston, my best friend from Louisiana, who would have been about 11 at the time, flew by herself to spend a week visiting me.

4. This set of questions was inspired by a news story about a woman leaving her nine-year-old in downtown Manhattan to find his own way home on transit and the controversy it caused (http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/04/07/is-9-too-young-to-ride-the-nyc-subway-alone/). What's your reaction to this story?

I think a lot of the people who flipped out about this are from the suburbs. Nine is too young, IMHO, but most of the people I've met who grew up in NYC started using public transit independently at a pretty early age. Incidentally, this is also really common in large European cities -- I used to know someone from Paris, and she said that she and all her classmates were taking the metro to school alone by the time they were 11 or 12. (Now, whether I would let G do this is another story -- see the next question.)

5. At what age would or did you let your kids (hypothetical kids, if you don't have them) do those things where you live now?

G is 10 -- close to 10 1/2, actually -- and she isn't allowed to play outside or go anywhere by herself. If we lived in the neighborhood immediately surrounding her school, where there isn't a lot of traffic and most of the people know each other, I would most likely let her walk to school next year (fifth grade) if she walked with a friend. But, we live on a busy street and don't know our neighbors, so she's not going to be walking anywhere without me in the near future. Maybe when she starts junior high.

As for the other situations, I wouldn't allow her to take public transit alone until high school, and probably not even then. Our bus system is awful and it's easy to miss a connection and get stranded somewhere, plus I have not-so-fond memories of being harassed by men, both in cars and on foot, while waiting at the bus stop. On the other hand, I probably would let her fly alone to visit relatives at 13 or so, assuming someone I trusted was meeting her at the other end.

Could have been worse

I spent quite some time this morning begging G to please please PLEASE go and see a movie with me for Mother's Day. She refused to do that, but she did finally consent, after I told her it was the only way she'd be eating as I wasn't going to cook, to eat lunch at a restaurant in the mall. I don't know why she always chooses Mother's Day to have one of her "I don't wanna go out" days, but she did the same thing last year.

On the bright side, once we actually got to the restaurant, she was very pleasant company, and even agreed to go to the bookstore for 20 minutes when we finished eating. She ended up getting a Webk*nz while we were there, so it was a good deal for her.

Anyway, I suppose this problem will eventually solve itself because she'll be old enough to stay home and do what she wants to do while I go out and do what I want to do, but I'd rather have her spend the day with me. Only, you know, not under duress. Sigh.

Oh good grief

Me: Hey, Mother's Day is this Sunday.
G: We should get a present for Catherine! She's a mom.
Me: Okay, that's great for the cat, but what should we do for me?
G: I don't know.

Aargh.

Here it comes

Friday night is the big annual Fifties-themed sock hop at G's school. She's excited and has already planned her outfit. I'm looking forward to it with all the enthusiasm I would reserve for another root canal. This is because unlike other events, where it's pretty common for one parent to bring the kid(s), the sock hop is a family night, which means that the few people I know well enough to chit-chat with will be with their families, leaving me to languish in total boredom while G alternates between running around with her friends and appearing to announce, "Mom, I need money for popcorn/glow bracelets/root beer floats/raffle tickets/a live raccoon." (OK, I'm kidding about that last one, but if they had a live raccoon booth she would totally be all over it.) I don't mind sitting by myself per se, but three hours is a long time to watch people do the Cha Cha Slide and eavesdrop while they gossip about other people I don't know. I wonder if it would look too weird if I brought a book to read.

How have I managed to have a child in the same school for five years without connecting with any of the other parents, you ask? Beats me. There's certainly a network of parents who know each other, drive each others' kids around, socialize outside school, etc., but I'm not part of it. We went on a big group trick-or-treating expedition last Halloween because G got invited by a friend whose mother is part of that network, and no one except the friend's mother said two words to me all evening. I think it's partly because we don't live in the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school, where most of these relationships seem to flourish; partly because I work full-time and am not at the school during the day; and partly because I don't have much in common with them other than the fact that our kids go to school together.

I know if P were around the situation would be different -- he was the sort of person who could talk to anyone, and if I walked away from him for five minutes in the video store, I'd come back to find him embroiled in a deep discussion with a total stranger about the merits of Jackie Chan vs. Chow Yun-Fat. But, he's gone and I'm crap at small talk, so here we are. It doesn't help that I don't watch TV or follow sports -- he used to say that those were the two golden topics if you wanted to talk to people you didn't know, and from conversations I've overheard, he was right. He also said that most people thought I was standoffish and didn't like them because I didn't jump in and chat, and he was probably right about that too. It isn't true, though; I don't dislike very many people at all. Well, except for those beeyotches from last Halloween. I have a special frowny face for them. Here it is: >:-<