So last week, my daycare called to inform me that I needed to come get my 19 month old kid immediately because he has head lice and he can’t come back until 24 hours after we get rid of it.

Imagine your toddler, who rarely travels outside of his daycare-to-home loop, whose only visitor to our house in a month has been Grandma, has freaking head lice!

I’m screaming inside my head. EWW! Get rid of it!

I didn’t notice my son scratching this morning, so I thought, this must be a mistake. We just got over dealing with fleas. Maybe he has a new insect bite on his head? What does a louse even look like? A nit is a real thing?

I dread this process already.

And then you wonder just how much getting rid of head lice is going to cost.

My husband has to leave work early to go pick up the Ax man. Assume we work for $100/day, so we just lost $12.00 in income right off the bat.

My husband is informed that the baby can’t come back until he is 24 hours nit-free, which guarantees us at least one more lost day of work (-$100.00) and one lost day of daycare paid for in advance (-$25.00). Yeah, you still have to pay even if he doesn’t go.

I suddenly felt so distracted and itchy that a coworker offered to check my head to make sure I was only imagining the creepy crawlies I was scratching at. Fortunately, my head passed her inspection.

But now you have to treat the lice.

So the boys head to the store to pick up the appropriate supplies:

• There’s head lice shampoo (-$6.00 per bottle. Gotta buy 2 and wash all four family members’ heads with it to be safe.) and it comes with nit picks*…Remember, you have to wash everyone’s hair again in 9 days. Buy enough.
• And since my inexpensive homemade laundry detergent is untested against lice, I’m not taking any chances. Buy the massive jug of Purex (-$13.00).
• And some play-doh (-$2.00), because we always watch our children with a hawk’s eye.
• Does everyone have a drink? (-$4.00 for drinks we wouldn’t have purchased had we not already been in a store.) Is everybody good now? Okay.

Go home and get started on mass cleaning efforts.

By the time you finish washing, you’ve done at least 15 loads of blankets, towels, clothes, rugs, comforters, sheets, pillows and stuffed animals. A basic energy audit shows that each load costs approximately $0.68. (-$10.20)

The next day I come home from work and my husband has decided that his earlier plan of picking nits while the baby’s sleeping was not a good plan. Successfully fight the urge to say, “I told you so.” There are still nits in the baby’s hair, so it looks like you’ll be staying home another day. (another -$125.00 missed day of work plus pre-paid daycare)

Also, you’ll need to run back to the store to pick up some lice killing spray (-$15.00 for three cans) to get all the stuff that won’t fit in the washer, like the couch, the carpet, the living room rug, everyone’s mattress & box spring, and you might as well spray the shoes, backpacks, and car seats, too, just to be sure.

While you’re there, pick up some more things you wouldn’t have bought, had you not been in a store (-$15.00 – Collateral Costs).

Spray all the surfaces and re-make all three beds. Children jump on the beds until they’re satisfied with the destruction. Remember how much that magazine article said it costs to raise children to the age of 18 and wonder if a bout with head lice is included in that figure. Try not to cry.

Nevermind the TIME you’ve lost in having to deal with this.

Think about all the time you spent washing fifteen loads of laundry, picking tiny nits out of a screaming, wiggling toddler’s hair, re-making all the beds in the house with completely new bedding, vacuuming, and all the scratching you’re doing because it’s still giving you the heebie jeebies.

I ask my husband to check my head again. Like monkeys. I’m an itchy monkey.

Or how about the lost work productivity and how the business has been affected by your absence? They’ll be two days longer getting their finished product to the buyer, putting them at risk for a less than stellar review. I’m not even sure how to put a dollar amount on that.

How do you even prevent head lice from moving in on your family?

Obviously, don’t share hairbrushes, combs, hats, and other things that touch the head. And launder anything that may have come in contact with lice. Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s much to preventing infestation.

But there isn’t much else you can do, unless you just don’t wash your hair ever and it stays too oily for them to stick.

I heard lice don’t like hair spray, but I don’t own any.

Seriously, I’m a ponytail/bun girl and leave the house with it wet most days. I know, shame on me, because I’m nearly forty, but I digress.

Some folks either don’t know or don’t care that they have head lice and are spreading it around in public for people to pick up and take home to their families. We suspect the lice came from another child in daycare who may have flown under the radar.

Regardless of how it happened, there’s a lesson. There’s always a lesson.

The lesson I’m taking is this: regardless of what we do to prevent it, lousy stuff is going to happen to us sometimes.

That lousy stuff usually costs money.

Sometimes it happens at the hands of other people: He ran into your parked car at the grocery store but is long gone before you check out.

Sometimes, it’s due to the extreme weather: the compressor in your air conditioner raised the white flag of surrender on one of the hottest days of the year.

Sometimes it’s because people are scared: your kid dumped the milk in the fridge all over everything and then “forgot” to tell you about it.

Are you ready financially for an unpreventable wallop to your pocketbook?

Are you prepared to take this little financial sucker punch without having to use your credit card or borrow money?

What steps are you taking to insulate yourself against this sort of unfortunate event? What is your plan if it happens twice in the same week?

Total Cost to eradicate head lice from our household this week: $333.20.

Sure, that figure could have been about thirty bucks less if we had shopped smarter, but we didn’t.

I’m not happy about ponying up the cash and reducing our extra debt payments this month, but I’m relieved we didn’t have to go into debt any further. And seriously, the fact that no one else in the family got head lice is nothing short of a miracle!

~ Erica

Owning Burton Farm

*Nitpicking…Did you know where that term came from before today? Because I only realized it this week, myself. Forgive me, but I now have more sympathy for the Nitpicker, than the Nitpicked.