Worst. Experience. Ever.

Well, I guess that might be exaggerating just a tad, but after I get into this you will be completely horrified. Trust me.

My youngest, the lovely Lena Lemon (daycare nick-named her that. Stupid nicknames are fine. Nicknames you can give up when you out grow them. Sorry Bronx Mowgli, you’re screwed forever), is a lucky lass because she has the most beautiful hair ever. It is a perfect strawberry blonde colour that holds the exact right amount of curl. You can give her one pony or two and her hair will immediately obey by forming perfectly soft and bouncy ringlets. She is SUPER cute.
She also goes to daycare with other people’s children who are not nearly as cute as she is. I can understand why these kids would feel jealous. Wouldn’t you be jealous if you had to spend all day with the most adorable person ever? I know I would be, but I don’t think I would feel the need to infect the beautiful person with BUGS. That’s right everyone, my beautiful little lady caught the lice.

As it turns out I am the worst mother of all time because it took the daycare to inform me Lena had lice. They phoned me at work to let me know that my daughter is super gross and I was to come and pick her up immediately. After throwing up in my mouth a little I left work, drove to the daycare and was immediately shamed. The director lady sat Lena on her lap, flipped her hair up and sure enough – tiny brown bugs crawling all up in my baby’s head. How did I miss that? Her hair is long, but it’s not super thick or anything. Surely if I was paying any attention whatsoever to this child I would have noticed the BUGS in her HEAD, right? I guess not. I suck.

Lena is only two years old so I had to give some thought as to how I was going to tell her about these bugs. She’s the kind of kid that could really go either way with that little bit of news; she would either (a) think it was cool, or (b) have a complete melt down and go totally hysterical for hours. As it turns out it was (c) – she couldn't have cared less. She was just so jazzed to be sprung from daycare early and was already planning an afternoon of riding the couch while eating her pudding cups, picking her nose and watching Treehouse with her buddy Elmo. Anyway, on my way home I stopped by the pharmacy and spent an obscene amount of money on lice killing paraphernalia in hopes of clearing this little problem up that afternoon. Yeah, not so much.

Not only did those little fuckers survive the first dose of ‘Lice Killing Shampoo’ (seriously – that is what it’s called. I naively assumed it would kill lice when you used it. Nope.), they managed to live through the hours of combing, laundry, picking at each individual strand of hair, more combing, more picking, some crying and screaming (from us both), more laundry, selective hair trimming and on and on and on. We went through this nightmare for seven solid days before I had to wave the white flag of surrender. Lena couldn’t deal with one more day of me picking at her head, I couldn’t stay up doing laundry and vacuuming until midnight anymore and I was totally out of ideas. I had also missed about five days of work trying to deal with this because she was banned from the daycare until she was declared cootie-free. Our lives had to go back to normal for the sake of us all so I came to an extremely painful conclusion…… I had to shave this girls head.

Here is Lena before –

















Here is Lena after –














Still cute, yes, but I really miss her hair. The upside to this story? Lena sat perfectly still the whole time I was shaving her head and when we were finally done and she saw herself in the mirror sans hair for the first time do you know what she said? “I LOVE IT because now I look like JAKEY!”. My little strawberry blond princess was thrilled to bits because now she had the same haircut as her seven year-old brother.

I guess the ‘girl’ must not kick in until you’re three.