Life lessons

Bela and Mae at New Buffalo Beach, Michigan. August 2011

A lot of the important lessons I try to teach my kids come out of my mouth as repetitive, meaningless dribble.
     *Eat your vegetables if you want to grow big and strong.
     *Brush your teeth or they'll rot and fall out of your head.
     *Don't wade out too far in the lake or the rip tide will carry you away.
     *Buckle your seat belt or you might die in a crash.
     *Don't put your finger in your nose or... or... Ok. There's not a really great reason for not doing this.

Once in a fortuitous while, the lesson and its consequence play out in real life, deeply impressing my children in a way that ensures they will never forget:
     *Don't fool around on the bunk bed or you'll fall and break a bone. (Flash back to November 2010 when Mae fell from the ladder and broke her collar bone.)
     *Don't eat too many sweets or you'll get sick. (Winter of 2008, Bela got her hands on far too many treats at her school's Christmas Fair and promptly threw up on the rug when she got home. She has NEVER forgotten this.)

Would you think less of me if I admitted that even though my children suffered (slightly) I found great pleasure in the consequences of their actions? While I was scrubbing the rug, while I was carrying Mae to the hospital across the street, I was secretly doing the "I told you so" dance, feeling vindicated. Feeling calm.  Feeling RIGHT, for once.

But recently, things went terribly wrong.

Bela is constantly picking at Mae: correcting, admonishing, advising, criticizing. It drives us all crazy. One night over dinner, Chris and I attempted to teach her something, a term, to describe her behavior. To help her recognize and label what she was doing to her poor, poor sister.

Nit Picking.

Unfortunately, she learned a short two days later the literal sense of that expression.

In the parking lot of JoAnn's fabrics, on an errand I was running less than 12 hours before leaving town for the wilderness of northern Ontario to fish for a week on an isolated lake while I dumped my children on my poor mother and Stepfather, I - responding to Mae's third complaint of a "scratchy head" - peered once again into the fine, golden hair of my 4 year old under the bright sun in a black-topped parking lot and saw....something. Something tiny. Something brown. Like the tiny tip of a cumin seed. Maybe I saw 5. Could it have been 10?

I shook off any fear of lice. Lice are bigger. Their eggs are white, right? You can see them just by looking, right? My children aren't supposed to get them. RIGHT? And then I looked in Bela's hair, squinting under the weakness of my terribly hyperopic eyes, and found the same mysterious cracked spices here and there near her scalp. I felt like throwing up.

I didn't look further. I didn't try to find any live lice. The nits (eggs) were enough for me. We got in the car and drove across the street to Target and I uncharacteristically loaded up on harsh pesticides. When it comes to infestation with a parasite, apparently my goals in natural childcare are easily compromised.

As I pushed the giant red cart through the aisles of the pharmacy, trying in vain to locate the product without having to die of embarrassment and ask for help, Mae kept chanting "I have eggs in my hair!" with glee. I was horrified.

After finally asking where to locate the lice shampoo, after suffering the look on the face of the young female pharmacist, I grabbed the $20 box and hightailed it home.

My mom was a trooper. Of course, by not calling to inform her first I didn't give her a chance to back out. But after a sleepless night filled with sobbing, washing, picking, packing, and dreaming about lice, I dropped the kids off in Wisconsin with coloring books, watercolors, bathtub toys, and RID, and I went on my semi-merry/semi-miserable way.

Now the ordeal has passed (mostly). And every night, after dinner, we all sit around the table with freshly washed hair and engage in some good, old-fashioned, nit picking.