Not so Blissful !

By now, I have figured out a way to produce eight gingerbread houses for the school’s advent fair; and I shrewdly shifted from baking ten bags of cookies to instead preparing ten bottles of flavored oil. That and the raffle for classes K, 2, and 7...and I am way ahead of the game.

Well done, mom. Well done.

In addition, I dutifully put my name down on several rotas for flipping burgers, clean up etc., AND I managed to go to all parents’ evenings as well as one-on-one consultations. I now know everything about my children, including their attitude to ring time and spelt pancakes.

And even though an episode of bronchitis has dragged us all down these past weeks, everyone seems to be upbeat. Instead of being bullied, Zoe now has turned to bullying behavior herself, Lea is successfully conjugating the verb ‘to be’ in her native language, and Julian is no longer crying in afternoon club.

In fact, on my walk back from school this morning, I felt as proud as a parade of prancing peacocks. I had made it through the first weeks of formal schooling, and that, all things considered, relatively unscathed.

After all, there was only one minor run in with the Kindergarten teacher about head lice followed by a talk with the principal about the Kindergarten teacher, and a visit to the school nurse to improve communication with parents on the same issue, which consequently triggered emails of surprising content and a round of fruitful mediation.

And just as I sat down to have breakfast after the early morning school run, the sun light sprinkling the ivory petals of a bunch lilies...,you guessed it...the phone rang and I am informed that class 2 has, indeed, nits.

Oh well, maybe they are going to pass on my memo after all. It is admittedly a rather outstanding piece of prose, rendered in a beautiful albeit somewhat wistful voice. One of my best, really. Here it is, so you know what I have been up to these past weeks:

If, while checking your child’s hair, you find tiny yellowish grains stuck to the hair shafts, it means there are adult lice around. These tiny kernels are so-called NITS and they are the eggs of the head louse.

Sometimes nits are mistaken for dandruff or sand, but unlike dandruff or sand, they are stuck to the hair and can only be removed by sliding them carefully down the hair shaft, one by one.

You will most likely never see a louse scrambling through your child’s hair, because they are good at hiding, but if there are nits there are lice!

Also, importantly, if you find any, please tell everyone, you have been with in the past week, that they need to check as well!! Someone probably does not know they have them, and that’s how you got it.

.....

Try to be thorough, because if a single louse survives, the cycle will start all over again ....