The Return of the Kutus

Last weekend Miss Five had her beautiful, long, golden locks chopped into a bob. Seven weeks of battling the ‘kutus’ will do that.

I wrote some time ago about our experience with nits when Master-then Four brought them home from kindy and shared them with the family.

The twins were only one at the time and, after I got over the shock of my babies having head lice, I realised there wasn’t a lot of hair for them to hide and found only a couple lurking.

But several years on, discovering activity in your daughter’s long and knotty hair, is a whole new ball game.

Although the rest of the family managed to escape them this time, it has still been a seven-week exhausting battle.

Female lice lay seven to ten eggs at night and when you treat the hair it is not treating the eggs. Therefore, when all the eggs have hatched nine days later, another treatment is required. It should just be a nine-day ordeal.

Not so this time.

Despite the special shampooing, fine-tooth combing, hair clip, brush and comb sterilization and hot water washing of the bedding, towel and school uniform on a daily basis, they just weren’t going away. And it wasn’t all the new lice hatching either. Big giant kutus would turn up the day after treatment. And so the cycle repeated.

How was this happening? It was doing my head in and, come to think of it, it was feeling rather itchy.

Myths abound that “well-to-do” people with clean hair don’t catch head lice and it’s often still a taboo subject. Perhaps there’s even an element of not wanting the finger to be pointed in the event of another child catching them but, after several weeks of unsuccessfully battling these invaders, I finally spoke out.

The teacher was onto it in a flash, sending out letters to parents and getting the children’s hair checked. This turned up a number of others, including, according to Miss Five, her close friends. Between them, it was kutu-central.

I don’t know why I thought I was in this alone, when, in reality, there were other parents close by dealing with the same thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that, of course, she was returning to school and being re-infected.

Funny how us parents had all stood together in the playground at pick-up time harbouring this knowledge for fear, I would imagine, of rendering our daughters unworthy of one another should their “secret” be revealed.

One day I decided to break the ice: “Oh those nits have been a nightmare but I think we’re on top of them now,” I declared.

“Tell me about it,” said the other mum,” looking relieved. “We’ve had them three times.”

Another mum joined in with her daughter’s experience and there you have it. If we’d just communicated this sooner, it might have nipped this ongoing nightmarish rigmarole in the bud sooner.

The catch-22 of the situation is that hairdressers won’t touch hair that is infected with lice but when you’ve got hair as long as Miss Five’s, it’s a mission to eradicate them. Life would have been a whole lot easier if she had short hair. Each night I’d spend nearly an hour combing through trying to remove the knots before attempting to comb out any lice while she sobbed in pain and begged me to let her go to bed.

We finally got on top of them, with the help of some diluted tea tree oil (repellent) sprayed in her hair before school each day and so I was able to book her in for the big chop.

Once proud of her beautiful, golden locks, she was happy to now get them all cut off. She certainly looked different but managed to pull it off and still look cute.

Despite a fair amount of scratching as I write this (have you been?), I am happy to declare us kutu-free and put all that behind us (for now).

So you’d think I’d have a bit more time on my hands. However, Miss Five’s new do requires straightening every day and I just can’t get it looking the way the hairdresser did. On Monday morning I had one nervous little girl worried that her friends wouldn’t recognise her.

After some attempts with the straighteners on my part she stood in front of the mirror and looked at her short, wayward hair in dismay. “Oh mummy,” she said woefully. “I wish this never happened!”

# Notify your child’s school or pre-school if head lice are found. Some provide information and natural treatments.

Fact Box:

# Headlice is a common problem around the world. They are small flat insects about two-three millimeters long that breed all year round;

# Their colour ranges from beige to grey but they may darken as they feed;

# Headlice cannot jump, fly or swim and remain on the head after swimming, bathing or showering;

# Female lice lay about seven – ten eggs each night while the person is still. Eggs are firmly glued to the hair and laid close to the scalp. Hair grows about one centremeter a month. Therefore any eggs found more than one centremeter from the scalp will have hatched and died;

# The eggs (nits) are small and hard like a grain of salt and are typically cream/brown or grey in colour. After hatching the nits (empty egg cases) are white;

# Eggs hatch in nine days and a louse will live for up to 40 days but only up to two days off the human body. Headlice found off the head are usually sick, old or injured and do not lay eggs;

# Common places they are found are around the hairline at the back of the neck, behind the ears and on the crown.

Lazy Little Sloths

I have to admit, despite all their good qualities, my three can be lazy little sloths.

Many kids these days are handed everything on a plate – which is then abandoned where they ate - and when asked to do a chore, it is meet with strong, protests of indignation.

It recently occurred to me that I was run off my feet doing all the chores while the kids were firing demands at me and, if they just helped me out, they would get their demands met quicker.

I pointed this out to them: They decided they would rather wait.

Suddenly I realised what I was doing: by carrying out everything for them I was inadvertently raising little sloths, thereby setting them up to expect everything to be done for them as adults. This would not be doing their future relationships any favours.

“Look, in the olden days, kids used to brave the icy cold and go and milk cows to have the milk to pour on their cereal,” I pointed out, but they just looked like they didn’t believe me and continued spooning Light n Tasty into their mouths.

It was time to introduce pocket money.

We started small – one had the task of carrying in the firewood, while the others shared the dishes.

It’s amazing what a bit of incentive can do – suddenly they were begging me to do the dishes. Trouble was, I found it hard handing over the reins and watching big puddles of water dripped across the kitchen floor and plates and cutlery declared clean when they were still smeared with Marmite and tomato sauce. Then there was the trail of bark from the door to the fire place.

But the problem with introducing rewards into the mix is you never know when they are doing things to be helpful or for an ulterior motive.

Master Five suddenly became really helpful that week. He went above the call of duty and on a mad cleaning frenzy. Cloth in hand, he ‘polished’ the whole house, including stair banisters and cupboard doors.

“This is a bit hard to get off,” he declared before marching over to the sink and wetting the cloth.

“Why are you cleaning the house?” his big bro asked warily, glancing up from the ipad.

“Because it’s all rusty,” he replied.

I didn’t know we had a rust problem in the house but the jury was still out on whether it was now cleaner than before he began.

“Mum, he’s just cleaning the house because he wants money,” Master Eight said in a knowing tone.

“No I’m not!,” Master Five protested. “I’m just being helpful aye mum?”

If he wasn’t before, he would be now, in a bid to prove his big bro wrong. But as I reluctantly watched him smear the now liquefied dust – or was it rust - across the glass window of the relatively clean ranch slider, I wondered if I should just let them be lazy sloths a little longer.

Spring Fever Again

Is spring here already or something? Besides the welcome but misleading sight of daffodils blooming outside my kitchen window since last week, you’d think, from the way my children were acting, it was.

I have written, two years ago, about how spring fever affects school children.

Spring fever is said to be driven by the body’s reaction to its changing environment; the increased amount of sunlight. As a result of improved moods, kids become more restless, disruptive, rowdy and generally silly. The onset of spring also brings a better climate for romance in mammals, including humans.

And, according to after-school reports from my lot, romance is in full swing in the playground.

Master Eight comes home from school last week full of the story how (we shall name them) Nate and Chloe fell in love that day.

Apparently they declared their love for one another by revealing their ‘crush’ written in their books. When they both saw each other’s names, embarrassed, they ran away in opposite directions.

And so began their romance.

The next day, for once, Master Eight was chaffing at the bit to get out the door.

“What time do gates open again?” he asked for the tenth time.

“Ten past eight,” I answered for the tenth time. “Why?”

“Because I want to get up to school to get on the computer first to play Minecraft.”

Yeah right.

Earlier that morning he’d got out of bed to tell me Nate and Chloe were having a wedding that day.

“But you don’t just ‘fall in love’ and then get married the next day!” I told him.

Despite his denials, this whole romance thing was clearly intriguing him and he shot off out the door to school to, no doubt, not miss the impending nuptials. 

When I look back at my previous story on this topic, it would seem nothing has changed. Boyfriends, girlfriends, getting dumped and marriage are still hot topics in our household but, still in denial - as far as my boys are concerned, girls are disgusting and vice-versa.   

However, their behaviour would suggest otherwise: Earlier in the week, after I’d dropped the kids off and was walking back across the playground I saw a bunch of giggling boys being chased by a pack of giggling five-year-old girls and was not surprised to find it was Master Eight and co. But I was surprised to find shy Miss Five at the helm of the pack of giggling girls. Both sides seemed to be having a ball.

But back to the “wedding of the year”: According to Master Eight, despite his best efforts to stop it, the wedding went ahead. Chloe and Nate exchanged loom band rings before kissing and running off – in opposite directions of course.