Boats, Shakes, and Spies

Thursday was our first full day in Washington, and I had planned ahead by booking us seats on a DC Duck Tour in the morning and making reservations at the International Spy Museum in the afternoon. The Boy was still feverish, the Girl was still limping, and the Baby was still incapable of walking a city block without turning around with her hands in the air and moaning, "cawey me!" Despite all this, we were going to have some fun! The Duck Tours depart from Union Station, which allowed me to reminisce to the children all my fond memories of the venerable train station. I mentioned the time that I bought a scarf at the Putumayo clothing store in the retail area at Union Station in the early 90's, before I realized that I wasn't a scarf person (and before Putumayo realized it was a world music company, not a clothing company). And, I told them that the Pizzeria Uno has been in the same spot on the upper level since I visited Union Station in high school. "When was that? The 1900's or something?" the Girl asked. Well, I never! Yes, but it was the late 1900's.

Pizzeria Uno in Union Station in 1990, or perhaps 2013. Who knows?

Obviously, the children were not entertained by my Union Station memories, which was unfortunately as we were quite early for the tour and had some time to kill. This is bad news because whenever the Baby gets bored and we're at a new place, her bladder shrinks to the size of a quarter and she'll whisper in her little voice,"Mommy, I need to use the westwoom." I'm fairly sure that it's just her love of public restrooms and not an actual physical need that is driving her request. Public bathrooms are generally just gross. Navigating public bathrooms with three children of different genders is highly inconvenient. I do love a nice family bathroom because it spares me the mental gymnastics involved in figuring out how whether it's more potentially damaging to take an eight-year-old boy to the women's room or send him alone into the men's room. Similarly, I haven't solved what to do with him while I take the Baby to the women's bathroom, except to have him loiter in the hallway outside the restroom like a pervert. If anyone has figured out how to do this, please let me know!

Freestyling, Flying Things, and Oblique References

Since we arrived at our hotel before noon, we had the entire afternoon to drag our exhausted/injured/sick children around Washington, D.C. And by "we," I mean "me" because the K had to go to work. His firm has a Washington, D.C. office so that he didn't have to miss a minute of the glamorous world of practicing law for a family vacay (insert emoticon with one wryly raised eyebrow). He was able to join us for lunch and was nice enough to pick a spot (BGR, The Burger Joint) and map out directions on his phone. Unfortunately, he selected driving directions, so we traversed nearly the entire circumference of Dupont Circle moving with the traffic, before we arrived at Connecticut Avenue, which was only two streets over from our starting point had we walked against the traffic. Did I mention that it was 98 degrees? When we finally reached Connecticut Avenue, we walked right past the restaurant, which was on the other side of the street, and were halfway to Maryland before we realized our mistake. At this point, the Baby decided that she could no longer walk and I completed the Butaan Death March to BGR carrying 98.6 degrees and 40 pounds of Baby. I wasn't exactly wowed by my veggie burger, but the kids seemed to like their sliders well enough. They did have one of those fancy Coke Freestyle machines:

Over 125 different Coca-Cola flavors. Read all about it in Wikipedia

Naturally, the children had to help me figure out how to use it because I was probably dehydrated from our flight and carrying the Baby all over God's green earth (err, well, God's grey sidewalk littered with homeless people). It certainly couldn't be that they had to help me because I am old. Certainly not!

Gimme a Break

Didn't Nell Carter have a way with words? I think that I've mentioned before that our school district is on a balanced schedule, which is a fancy way of saying that the kids have two months off during the summer and four one-week breaks during the year. Although,"break" is kind of a misnomer, if you ask me. First of all, it's not a break for me to have to entertain the children for an additional eight hours a day, and it's not a break to plan a vacation and play cruise director, so I'm not calling them breaks anymore. I'm calling them continuations.

So, for our Fall Continuation, we planned to visit Sister who lives in Washington, D.C. We all know what happened last time our family traveled to the Nation's Capital. That's right, lice-a-palooza 2011. I had high hopes for this trip, because how can you really top discovering a head lice infestation at 9:00 pm, the night before you are scheduled to tour the White House? Admittedly, it would be tough, especially because we couldn't go for the whole week because the K had to work. But, we had a full compliment of activities scheduled for our Wednesday through Saturday trip including museums, meeting the president and vice president, and getting a puppy. Do you think I'm joking? I am not. We are just that bad ass.

Our saga began on Saturday, the first day of "continuation" when the Baby came down with a fever of 103. I dosed her up with Motrin and resigned us all to waiting out the illness. How long could it last? Surely she would be better by the time we left on Wednesday. On Saturday night, while I was checking on the Baby's fever, I heard a crash from the Girl's room. She had woken up from a deep sleep and found that she had pins and needles in her foot (I would say that her foot fell asleep, but then, she was asleep, so that would be confusing.) She jumped out of bed and tried to shake her foot awake and inadvertently banged it on the bed frame. She seemed okay at the time and went back to sleep.

The next morning there was no change to the Baby's fever and I was so consumed with keeping track of her temperature and giving her Motrin and Tylenol that I completely ignored the Girl who complained that her foot was bothering her from where she kicked the bed frame. I think it's an unwritten rule of parenting that the kid with the fever gets more attention than the kid with unspecified orthopedic complaints, unless a bone is sticking through the skin. Speaking of breaks...

via

Lice, Lice, Baby

Apologies for the plague postings this week, but it's just a germy time of year. Last week I was scratching my head. I wasn't wondering about anything, I was just itchy. Oh great, I thought, the dreaded lice are back for their annual (sometimes biannual) visit. I got out this:

If you know what that is, then you've walked a mile in my lice-infested hat. I combed and combed, but nothing. Nada. No lice. Yay! But then, why was I itching? I wandered over to the shower to inspect my new bottle of shampoo. The new shampoo looked like this:

No, you're right. That doesn't say shampoo. It says detangling solution. I'd been washing my hair with detangler for a week! So, if any of you saw me last week and wondered why I was so greasy, there's your answer. In my defense, the detangler and shampoo look an awful lot alike. Here's the side-by-side:

I was ever so grateful to not have lice again because we have been through the lice wars, folks, and we have the Cetaphil Gentle Cleanser bottles and the nit combs to prove it. For our first go-around with lice, I used Nix, but subsequently switched to Cetaphil because I started getting freaked out about all the chemicals. You can read the complete directions of how to treat lice at home with Cetaphil here, but the basic instructions are to douse the infected person's head in Cetaphil Gentle Cleanser so that it's basically dripping off his or her head, wait 2 minutes, comb out the excess Cleanser, and then dry the Cetaphil into the hair. It has taken me up to a hour to dry the Girl's hair when we've gone this route. It would probably be easier if you have one of these lying around:

Love it! It's like she has a Jiffy Pop bag on her head.

I am about to tell you the worst lice story ever. Well, maybe that's hyperbole, but it's my worst lice story. If you've got one to top it, lay it on me because I love a nightmarish lice story.

Remember when I told you that we went to D.C. last spring break and how we learned about Congressional history from Dad and we saw the White House and went bowling at the Old Executive Office Building? Well, I omitted a couple of unsavory details. The night before our west wing tour, I was helping the kids get ready for bed when the Girl started itching. Lump in my throat, I peered at her head. Lice. WTF. It was nearly 9 p.m., we were staying at a town house on Capitol Hill, and I had none of my lice-ridding paraphernalia that I'd used to de-louse us in the past. I broke the news to the K.

"[The Girl] has lice."

"What does that mean?"

"We can't go to the White House tomorrow if she has lice! What if she gives lice to the Sasha and Malia?"

"Who are they?"

"The Obama girls." (DUH!)

"I'm pretty sure the tour isn't of their bedrooms and that it would be a pretty major security breach if Secret Service let [the Girl] roll around on their pillows." 

This is one of the reasons that the K and I are compatible. When I totally freak out, he stays calm and when he freaks out, I stay calm. The K changed into running clothes and (literally) ran to the nearest open drugstore (thank you iPhone) while I started washing pillowcases and clothes. We were definitely lucky that we had a washer and dryer. If we'd been in a hotel, I honestly don't know what we would have done.

The K was back surprisingly quickly and was also surprisingly less sweaty than usual following exercise. It turned out that while the townhouse where we were staying is in a good neighborhood, if you went a couple of blocks in the wrong direction it became markedly less gentrified. That's my nice way of saying that we were just west of the ghetto. So, the K, who is, like I've said, built like a football player, got worried because of the domestic altercations and gunshots that he heard on his way to the drug store and decided to cab it back to the town house. Thank goodness nothing happened to him, and not only because I don't want anything to happen to him. Can you imagine me having to explain to the police that, no, he wasn't in the neighborhood to buy drugs or hire a hooker, but to get Cetaphil Gentle Cleanser to treat our daughter's lice?? Yeah, right, lady.

This was our last bout of lice and I didn't actually manage to get rid of it with our midnight de-lousing in Washington, D.C. My attention to detail, as has been documented in this blog, is not the best. So, while I did my best to nit-pick the Girl's hair, I must have missed some and by May, half the family were itching. This time, I was not messing around. A friend tipped me off to Elimilice, a lice-removal facility with several locations in the Atlanta metro. They checked the entire family and found that the Girl and I had lice and that the Boy had some nits. The K and the Baby were lice-free. The ladies who work there have the patience of saints. I am not joking. It took a couple of hours for them to comb through my hair and the Girl's hair. It didn't take as long for the Boy because his hair is shorter. Meanwhile, the kids watched movies, ate snacks, and had just about as much fun as you can while someone combs through your hair looking for vermin. We left with three lice combs, color-coded, labeled, and in separate bags for each of us who had been infected. We also went back a week later for a re-check to make sure we were still clean. I will tell you that it was worth every penny to know that we were lice-free.

Since this spring I have been much more vigilant about preventing lice on the front end, so that we don't have to go through the process of getting rid of them again.

• The kids have been using Fairy Tales Hair Rosemary Repel shampoo and conditioner when they wash their hair. Fairy Tales Hair has a special on the website, for every $25.00 spent, customers get a free Rosemary Repel product of their choice. Time to stock up!
• The Girl has long hair and I try to have her wear her hair in a ponytail every day. 
• Before the kids go to school (or camp in the summer), I spray their heads with either Fairy Tales Hair Rosemary Conditioning Spray or Lice Knowing You School and Play Spray. 
• Lice Knowing You is available at Elimilice and I like it because you can spray the kids' stuff, too. So, I spray their backpacks and coats with the Lice Knowing You every day before school. 
• Eileen, the owner of Elimilice was nice enough to send this promotional email for me to share with you all: Elimilice Promotion So, if you go to that link, you'll find a document that you can print out and present at one of the Atlanta-area Elimilice locations and get a 15% discount on prevention products. I am all over this deal!

Eileen also shared with me some information on doing an at home lice check. She also has an interesting post on the Elimilice blog about current thinking in treating for lice. I want to thank her so much for the valuable information and the discount.

Whew! This was a long post, but one that I hope will be helpful. Well, I really hope that you will never have to deal with lice at all! But, if you do and you have a really good (and by that I mean bad) lice story, let me know! Good night!