Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I Hate to Nitpick


but nitpicking is exactly what I have been doing for the last 1.5 hours. From Wikipedia:

Nitpicking is the act of removing nits (the eggs of lice, generally head lice) from the host's hair. As the nits are cemented to individual hairs with louse saliva, they cannot be removed with lice combs and, before modern chemical methods were invented, the only options were to shave all the host's hair or to pick them free one by one.

This is a slow and laborious process, as the root of each individual hair must be examined for infestation. It was largely abandoned as modern chemical methods became available; however, as lice populations can and do develop resistance, manual nitpicking is still often necessary.

As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious, meticulous attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail (often referred to as "nits" as well), and then criticising them. "Nitpicker" in this sense was often used after 1951, predominantly in the United States.

I got a call this morning from the kid's school saying that Aida had to go home because, like 9 other kids in her grade, she has head lice. Yuck. We have been very lucky up to now - many times we have gotten a paper saying that other kids from her class had them and until now, our 5th year at the school, neither of the kids got them.

I felt like a mama monkey picking bugs out of my baby's hair. {well except I didn't put them into my mouth.} Let me tell you those little nits are not easy to get out. Most of the time the lice comb worked, but a couple of times I literally had to pinch it off with my fingers. In Aida's dry hair I can hardly see them, but wet those little nits are much easier to see.

Hopefully I got them all. Otherwise when they check her hair in the morning at school I will get another phone call. Definitely a humiliating mama moment.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm so sorry...I hope they are gone now. Even Muffy had them, remeber that episode from Arthur?

Anonymous said...

Don't be humiliated..be PROUD. You are now part of the club. Actually I had nits in England, when I was 9, and I know that Isabel and Benjamin are going to get it...eventually...because we keep getting the notice too from school that it's going around.

ellenmac said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ellenmac said...

(I'm the one who deleted a comment. I just needed to fix a typo.)

Sometime recently I happened to notice a display of headlice products in a store. There were so many! That told me that this is really common. Courage, you will overcome this. I'm so glad that shaving the head is no longer standard practice. Aida's hair is so beautiful.

Anonymous said...

Let's just hope that's the worst thing she ever catches at school!

craig or cami said...

Two horrible memories came rushing back to me.... My brother chasing me all around the house singing "My dog has fleas!!" and wearing a pastel nightgown while I sat on my bed with my radio on shaking my head into my lap then frying them in the radio! Gross! I must also publicly admit that I remember putting a single lice in one of the nasty twins' hair in class. eck. I'm so ashamed. Thanks Lauren, now I can put these atrocities back in crevices of my mind where they belong until possibly Finley is stricken.