The ladybug is the natural enemy of the louse. Viva is ready.
This week’s blog post is by The Paternity Test co-host Matt Boresi, who lives in the Edgewater Glen neighborhood of Chicago with his wife (“Professor Foster”) and their 4-year-old daughter Viva, who will not share her hat with you, no matter how nicely you ask.
By now you’ve heard the panicked news stories or had your alarum sounded via e-mail from concerned relatives: Super Lice have made it to 25 states, including Illinois. (Which also means that more states are now accepting virulent scalp parasites than are accepting Syrian refugees – thanks, Rauner.), They are resistant to over-the-counter lice medicine, the are impervious to amateur combing efforts. They are here, they are hungry and they going to exsanguinate our children, turning them into tiny, dessicated husks in light-up sneakers.
So, what to do? Kill the lice with fire? Bad idea. Take off and nuke the site from orbit? Impractical. Hide from them in John Goodman’s bunker? Seems sketchy.
Here are five tips to help you win the battle of Super Parent v. Super Lice, so you won’t find yourself with an itchy kid, burning your pillowcases and desperately searching Groupon for “$100 Off Professional Louse Removal”:
Stay away from other children
Children are filthy. The pick their noses and they cough on you and now they carry super evolved weaponized lice. Gross. It’s bad enough you have to be around your own little disease factory – keep a safe distance from everybody else’s. Stay away from libraries (Books are for nerds, anyway), Puppet shows (creepy) and definitely homeschool your child. They will grow up thinking Jesus rode a velociraptor into Bethlehem and that glumly bouncing a ball against a wall all alone constitutes a sport … but they will NOT get lice.
Move to Hawaii, Alaska or … Wyoming?
Of the 25 states which harbor Super Lice, the states with the most geographic buffer between them and the Super Lice are, of course, the noncontiguous states. Trouble is, Hawaii has other dangers, like lava, rising oceans and that cursed tiki idol that the Bradys found that made a tarantula crawl up Peter’s chest in the night. Alaska has super bears, super wolves and the Palins. That leaves the next furthest state from the outbreak – Wyoming. Seems pretty safe, you’ll just have to live in Wyoming.
Defoliate the super louse’s habitat
You can’t kill these lice, you can’t pick out these lice, but you can pull a Once-ler and chop down all the trees they love so they move away. Simply keep your child’s head shaved until shampoo technology improves or the epidemic subsides. You will, of course, get many sympathetic looks from at the grocery store, and Lucy may try to pull the football out from in front of your kid, but the Super Lice will be gone.
Drop your kid off at the zoo for a while
I know you can leave your baby at most fire stations if you’re in a real pickle – hopefully the zoo is as welcoming, because if you just drop your kid off at the monkey house for a couple of weeks, most simians are expert nit-pickers and will pull all the lice from your child’s scalp and eat them. Remember when that kid fell in the Brookfield Zoo gorilla pen back in ’96? The Mama gorilla, Binti Jua, was totally nice to him and he has never had lice to this day.
I should know, Dear Reader, for I was that boy.*
Introduce natural predators (Ladybugs)
Ladybugs can eat 100 lice a day! Plant lice, anyway, but I’m sure it’s the same with head lice. COVER YOUR CHILD IN LADYBUGS. You can purchase them at any of those “Brew ‘n Grow” type stores where people grow weed by equipment and pretend to grow tomatoes with it. If you child is too squeamish to be covered in ladybugs, tell them, “Jeez, kid. They’re only ladybugs, for cryin’ out loud.” Or put them in a bike helmet covered in ladybug stickers, or just keep them dressed as a ladybug all the time. Super Lice will think they are a Super Ladybug and leave a wide berth. Super Ladybug = super cute!
Super Lice maybe be robust, resilient and nearly omnipresent, but so were Passenger Pigeons and Blockbuster Video stores – and you don’t see many of those around anymore, do you? We can wipe these out, too!
*No, I wasn’t.
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