Lice rhymes with nice...

...but that's about as far as the similarities go.

Yes, if you are currently experiencing an itch that wasn't there before, you are familiar with the term Head Lice. It's not a nice term, and not a nice predicament to find yourself in. For the 2nd time in 3 years, one of my children brought home a friend from daycamp and that friend invited two friends who laid two eggs and so on and so on, until there was a party going on on my kid's scalp. My kid shared it with my wife and now it's like a double-mint commercial, but with less smarmy smiles. Not unlike facebook-inviting friends to your house party, lice bring troubles with them. Treating (or rather killing) the little bug(gerers) is easy enough, I suppose. Just $30 of insecticidal shampoo and ten minutes before rinsing... or so it would seem. The box doesn't tell you about the medieval torture devices that come with the shampoo. These often come in fanciful and pretty colours like blue or green and resemble afro-picks from the 80's but with much smaller teeth. Their duty is to help you pick lice from your hair, but their secret agenda is to introduce you to the joys of male-pattern baldness at an early age - through the ripping out of as many hairs as possible. Usually, this means that per pound, you rip out close to 1000x more hair than you uncover lice. Sure, lice are small but child psychologist bills are expensive and how else are you going to explain that all that pain is worth not having an itchy head  to a 5 year old.

This, of course, goes on for a few days, morning and evening. In the meanwhile, there's so many more fringe benefits for the parents than the box lets on. Who else can say that they change and wash all the bedsheets in their house daily, as well as all towels and clothes and who get to store teddy-bears in garbage bags outside their house for weeks at a time.  Don't worry about that last bit though... the kids will have no problem at all going to sleep after an hour of hair-pulling torture without their teddies. They fall right asleep, letting their parents continue with the laundry and vacuuming of all the sofas, couches, beds and rugs that their kids glanced at during the day.  Aah...lice. It's so much fun.