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This is news that shocks me to my core. The other day a faraway friend called me, shuddering, to say she’d just discovered head lice on her five-year-old. She knew I’ve been through that particular horror myself—twice, a year apart, the second occurrence being just days after we arrived here in California three years ago. At the time, I knew exactly one person in San Diego, and you can imagine my dismay when I discovered our (quite advanced) infestation mere hours after we had visited her home for the first time. Beanie’s head was crawling with the beasties, which we probably picked up somewhere on our long cross-country drive. I had to tell my new friend that we had very possibly brought lice into her beautiful home. My children had played in her children’s bedrooms, had rolled around on her sofa, had most probably tried on her children’s hats. She was, of course, completely gracious about it, and to my immense relief, no one in her family ever did get the cooties from us. Whew.

Having battled those two infestations in years past, and having triumphed over the nasty little creatures not once but twice—I blame Little Gym for our first bout when my three oldest girls were very small—I was at once filled with sympathy for my poor friend who called last week. She was looking for a battle plan. How best to vanquish the bloodsucking hordes?

Fortunately for her—oh so very fortunately—her call came the day after I happened to read this post at Light and Momentary. If she had called but one day earlier, I would have told her to cancel all her plans for the next week and prepare to spend hours each day combing, combing, combing with the trusty Licemeister. And nitpicking. You must remove every single nit, I’d have told her, as others had told me—the most effective way is to take tweezers and slide each individual nit along the hair, all the way to the end, and then wipe the tweezers on a damp cloth. Effective and TIME-CONSUMING.

That’s how I battled head lice, twice. Hours of labor. Seriously, I know I spent at least an hour per head, morning and evening, on three heads. Six hours a day of combing and picking, minimum. For a week or more. Both times. It was miserable.

(Except—and I know this will sound strange—the girls and I came to actually enjoy the extended time together, with nothing to do but talk. Besides comb and squish and tweeze, of course. Beanie, especially—she was five years old during round two—loved the luxurious stretches of undistracted Mommy time. Poor little middle child!)

But as I said, it was lucky for my friend that Jamie’s post alerted me to a new approach, a much better approach. It involves slathering the head with Cetaphil, three applications a week apart. Jamie explains in detail, so I’ll let you read it from the source.

Most shocking of all to me is this statement at the site Jamie links to:

If you need to remove nits to comply with your school’s “no nit policy,”  then use the Licemeister comb to carefully go through the entire scalp. It will remove many nits. If your child’s school does not have such a policy, then skip this step. It adds 70% more work and is unnecessary to cure children of head lice.

Unnecessary!!

Unnecessary!!

Hours and hours of my life spent nitpicking unnecessarily!

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Ahem.

Anyway, just like Jamie, my friend has had spectacular results with the Cetaphil method.

And she hasn’t picked a single nit.