A few weeks ago, while dropping off the girls at school, one of Audio’s classmates arrived with a shaved head.  I figured that he tried to give himself a haircut, or had a bubblegum mishap, or something.  The kid doesn’t look too terribly bright, and with a stubbly head he looked like he could be the character who I don’t know the name of, who is the antagonist from one of the cartoons the girls watch that I don’t know the name of, either.  At the end of the day, I asked Audio if she knew what happened to the boy’s hair.  She said that she didn’t know and then proceeded to pull a sheet of paper from her backpack and handed it to me.  It was information about how to search for and deal with head lice. 

I immediately started to dig through Audio’s hair, and sure enough, I saw something on her scalp.  I was able to pull out some dark colored things.  But, even with my best pair of glasses and a magnifying glass, I couldn’t make out what they were.  I had Audio sit on a blanket in the middle of the living room and watch TV.  I had to convince Dee Dee that she should stay on the couch and that sitting on the blanket wasn’t as fun as it looked.  By the time my wife got home, I had learned that lice eggs wouldn’t be dark in color, and that Audio had been lying in the sandbox at school during recess.  Either way, she needed her hair washed.  But I felt a little better that she didn’t have lice. 

The next morning, I overheard one of the parents tell Audio’s teacher, “Well, she caught it.”  I looked around for that parent’s kid and found her standing inside of a hula hoop with Audio.  I tried a few different ways of convincing Audio that she should get out of the hula hoop and say “goodbye” to me.  She wouldn’t do it.  She wanted to try the hula hoop, alone.  The girl who “caught it” didn’t want Audio to use her hula hoop alone.  I watched as the girls both tried to lift the hula hoop over the other’s head.  Eventually, the girl let Audio try it, unsuccessfully, and then asked for it back.  As concerned as I was about Audio getting too close, I knew that there was a full day of opportunities ahead of her to catch the lice that I wouldn’t see or know about.  So, I told Audio that I was leaving and hoped for the best. 

When I got the girls home from school in the afternoon, I looked through Audio’s hair and this time saw light colored things.  There weren’t a lot of them, but enough to notice and it was clearly not sand.  So, I set up the blanket again and convinced Dee Dee that she did not want to sit on the blanket and waited for their mom to get home.  When she did, she looked at Audio’s head and reported that what I was seeing was not lice eggs, but left over shampoo from the previous day’s shower.  I guess that Audio wasn’t cooperating with her mom while getting her hair washed and as a result, she didn’t get all off the shampoo rinsed out of her hair leaving flakes on her scalp.  I felt bad for making a big deal out of nothing, but again, I felt better knowing that she didn’t have any signs of lice. 

The next morning, as I watched Audio walk with her teacher and classmates into the school, I saw one kid getting out of his dad’s car and running to catch up with the class.  His head was shaved.  I spent the day dealing with the fact that eventually, one way or another, Audio was going to come home with lice and share it with the rest of us.  I texted my wife who informed me that we have a bottle of lice shampoo in our linen closet that she spotted on the discount shelf at the grocery store when Dee Dee started pre-school.  Feeling somewhat prepared for the inevitable, I relaxed a bit. 

When Audio got home from school, I asked her if the boy I had seen in the morning had his head shaved because he had lice.  Audio explained that while his dad was teaching him how to ride his bicycle, he fell over and managed to get his hair caught in the chain, requiring his dad to cut his hair with his “. . .jack: a kind of knife.”  I still searched through Audio’s hair while she told me where she’s going to ride her bike, once she learns to ride it.  I didn’t see anything in Audio’s hair, but I had my wife take a second look after she got home. 

Over the next week or so, we kept an eye on Audio’s head but never saw anything else that could be confused with lice, nits, or eggs.  This morning, I was finally able to speak with one of Audio’s teachers and she confirmed that, as far as she was aware, the lice scare has ended.  But she looked uncomfortably concerned when she said, “We are still asking parents to not send blankets, pillows, or stuffies to school for the rest of the school year.”  I agreed and told her that sounded fine to me and then I started to walk back home.  About half way home it dawned on me that while we thought that there was reason to worry and be vigilant, we worried about a situation that was happening right in front of us.  Now, that the all-clear had been given is when we won’t be watching out for lice as well as we have been and they could slip in and do their damage right under our uninterested noses.  Part of me feels more worried about lice than ever and part of me feels that an out-of-sight, out-of-mind policy is easier on my nerves, at least for a while.  We’ve only got two more weeks of this school year left.