Oh come ON

Tuesday morning I drove Caitie across town for a doctor's appointment. It went fine, except that they were out of varicella so I will have to bring her back again. But things were still good. It was nice even, Rob was working the late shift this week so we got to go to the doctor without Sean.

Came home, Rob left. I did some housework, looked over my list of things to do this week, took Sean to school at 11:45. All pretty normal.

At 12:30 I get a call from school that Molly has lice. Again. For those of you who haven't been lucky enough to meet Molly, she's a very tall, very strong, usually sweet autistic 9 year old girl, who will scream bloody murder if you even think about brushing her hair. Nit combing is a nightmare. One I can't really find the words to describe. Bad. Awful.

So, I drive to school to pick her up, kind of with the vague hope that maybe the school nurse is wrong. Of course she was not. We didn't see any live lice, but a whole mess of nits in 1 spot.

I left her in the office so I could go talk to her teachers about it, because I can NOT figure out how she has them again. There must be one thing of hers that we didn't get cleaned. I don't know. Also, I am stalling, because I know I'm going to have to nit comb her by myself (Rob working the late shift and all). My stomach actually hurt from thinking about doing this to her again. If you've never had to deal with lice, the way you have to treat them is mechanical. You can get all kinds of stuff to put on your head, but it won't kill the eggs, only the live lice. You pretty much have to use this thing called a nit comb. It's a comb with very very fine teeth, so fine that it pulls your hair when you use it. So fine that if there's an egg glued to your hair, the comb will pull it off. You have to do it in tiny tiny sections and it takes forever.

While I'm standing in the hallway talking to them, Sean walks by with a teachers aid because he'd peed his pants. Oh, and the extra pair he's supposed to have in his backpack weren't there. And school doesn't have anything that will fit him.

SO, I take Molly, drive home, get pants, go back to school, and drop them off. I actually dropped off 3 pairs of pants - 1 for him to wear, 1 for him to put in his backpack, and 1 that's too small to keep in the nurse's office for back up. Then I take Molly to the store. And we have a conversation like this:

Me: Molly, is there anything you want?

Anything I could buy you that would get you to let me comb your hair?
Molly: nope

Me: Anything?

Molly: No! Don't comb me. I don't want to be combed. I want to be EX combed. NO MORE COMBING. You can't comb me.

Me: OK but we have to comb out the lice. I know that you aren't going to like it but we have to do it anyway. I *AM* going to comb you. Is there anything I can get you to make you feel better?

Molly: Nope. No combing. I don't want any combing.

Me: what if I buy you ice cream? You could have it when we're done.
(She *never* gets ice cream- this is a major bribe. Gluten free dairy free ice cream is hard to come by.)

Molly: Nope

Me: Chips? Candy? What about a movie?

Molly: Nope

Me: Video game? Toy?

Molly: Nope. You can't comb me. No combing. EX combing.

Me: *sigh*

So, I buy some skittles for her and some dark chocolate for me, and some sugar free gum for Caitie because I'm going to make her help me. I don't usually like using food for bribes, but desperate times...

I also spent this whole time trying to call Rob so the name of the stuff that was our other option (there are several kinds of lice treatment, and the most common one is also the one that is the most toxic and least likely to work, but I can't remember which the other ones are- I only remember that there were 2 that were ok, and we used one of them before). He's not answering his phone. *sigh*

I'm sure that none of the stuff at the first store is the stuff we want, so we leave and go to store number 2, which has nothing. Store number 3 has stuff I *think* is the other stuff we almost used but didn't the last time. They definitely don't have the stuff we used before. All through stores 2 and 3 Molly gets more and more pissed about the whole business and is now just yelling about EX combing. (Everything is EX something around here). Call Rob again. Nothing. So I buy it, and a giant squishy hairy ball thing that Molly likes, drag her to the car and race home so I can beat the bus.

Molly wants to watch Wall-E. We can't find it. It's no where in the house, I have no idea. We settle for Tinkerbell. I put the lice stuff in her hair, which she cries about, but not that bad really. It says wait 10 minutes. I waited 20. I got all the sheets and pillows and stuffed animals and hats and start the mountain of laundry. Sean peed his pants AGAIN. I got the Time Timer and set it for 15 minutes. Gave Caitie the bag of Skittles, with instructions to give Molly 3 every time the timer goes off. I work on Molly's hair. It takes 3 hours, with short breaks every 15 minutes. In between she screams and I comb her hair. At some point I ate a hot pocket because I hadn't gotten lunch yet. 45 minutes into it Tinkerbell stops working. We take it out, clean it, put it back, still stuck. We finally had to skip a big portion of the movie. It seemed like the last straw for Molly. Not ONLY is all this horrible combing going on, but now the movie is broken. Hysteria ensues. By the end I was holding her with my legs, and my back is all screwed up.

I have to just say here that Caitie was fantastic that day. She had a school project and she worked on it in between running in to hand me things or feed Molly Skittles, and didn't complain once. She helped get Sean dinner, washed dishes, helped me strip the beds and gather hair supplies for decontamination, and was generally helpful and awesome. So much so that I was starting to wonder who she was.

So, I had just enough time to wash the crap out of Molly's hair, put it into a pony tail, get her dressed, change MY clothes, and run over to my sister's house to drop Sean and Molly off so we can go to the middle school open house (Gah- I am not ready to be the mother of a middle schooler). I practically threw them out of the car. Turning a corner on the way out of their neighborhood I hit something. I really couldn't even figure out what the hell it was but it made a really loud noise. I look behind me, can't see anything. Look at my right side mirror, it's folded up, smashed, and dangling by a wire. Great. I look back and apparently I hit the door of a grey (invisible) mailbox, which was open and sticking straight out. The mailbox was completely fine. Mirror is screwed.

Middle school open house seemed to go ok. Nothing terrible went wrong. I made it back in a reasonable time. Brother in law had made them dinner so I let them eat. Sean said he wasn't hungry. Oh, and he peed his pants again while we were gone. (Seriously?! He's 6. This is pretty ridiculous.)

Molly's favorite thing to do at their house is throw stuff down the laundry chute. Pretty much just anything. Down the chute. I was trying to wrangle all our stuff together, and every time I turn around Molly is putting something down the chute again. I finally got them to go outside, and Molly fell in the driveway, ripped her pants, and cut her knee and was bleeding and crying. This is when I start to think someone is actually out to get me. We get it cleaned up, put a band aid on it, and as I'm driving away at 10 past bed time, Sean says "I'm hungry". gah! Srsly? No.

We get home and I start putting people to bed. There's a massive amount of stuff to do, house is seriously trashed. I let the sink water out from earlier, and all of the sudden I'm standing in a puddle of water. The joint under the sink came apart. Oh come ON. WTF world? I don't even HAVE any clean towels left in the house at this point. Everything under the sink is wet. I had to clean it up with clothes and put them back in the laundry pile, which is threatening to block the path from my kitchen to the bedrooms.

Last thing I did was have a very big drink and go put the needles back in that had came out of the shawl I was knitting. Srsly.

I blame daylight savings time.