What To Do if You're Currently Dealing With a Head Lice Infestation:

If you've come here because you're already up to your noggin in head lice, let me first encourage you to take a deep breath and calm down. Let's have a little hand-holding moment: You are going to be ok. You are going to get through this. And then I will help you make sure this never happens again.

OK, ready?

First, what you need to buy:
1. Robi-Comb
2. A metal nit/egg comb
3. Head lice repellant spray

Quick things you can do:

1. If you have boys who will not mind, you can shave their heads. That's what I did when I first found head lice. If there is no hair to hide in, the lice will not be able to stick around. This is why I keep my littlest boys hair cut very short.

2. Get the Robi-Comb and start carefully combing through the hair. You need to be slow and thorough. This is not a quick run-through. Take your time, carefully separating the hair into sections, and keeping the already-checked sections away from the waiting-to-be-checked sections. Hair clips are very helpful with this. Have a paper towel on your lap to brush off the dead lice that you will find.

3. Once you have gone through and gotten rid of all the live lice, go through the same person's head in the same manner, using the metal egg comb. The eggs are attached pretty close to the head, usually within an inch. So, you don't have to comb the whole length of the hair for this part.

4. If your problem is quite extensive, you may want to do these comb-throughs on every person twice a day until you feel that you are making good headway. Otherwise, once a day comb-throughs with both the Robi-Comb and the egg comb should be sufficient. Do this every day for 7-10 days. Then reduce to every other day for a week, in case something new hatches from an egg you missed. After that, if you have still not found any more lice or eggs, you can go back to once a week head checks.

5.
Keep using your repellant spray every day to discourage any new lice from coming along, and to hasten the retreat of any live lice you may have missed.


6. It was helpful for me to learn that head lice cannot live off of a human host for more than 24 hours or so. You do not need to wash every bit of laundry or vacuum every crack and crevice in your home on a daily basis. Basic vacuuming is good to do, but you don't need to go crazy about it. Chemical sprays that are sold to use on beds, furniture, and floors are also pesticides that leave dangerous residues in your home that your whole family will be inhaling and in direct contact with. Can you imagine the risk to babies who crawl and play on the floor, or children who sleep in pesticide-covered beds? These items are expensive and not worth the risk. Lice live on people--not in their homes!

7. Some common advice is to bag up all stuffed animals and spare bedding for a few weeks. When I was overwhelmed with our head lice infestation, I simply closed off one room at a time for a day and a half or so, letting any traveling lice die off while there were no humans to reach. I did not bag up anything, didn't vacuum all that well, and didn't wash every item of laundry we owned. By letting a few of the children bunk together in one room and closing off some others, rotating each night, I was able to drastically cut down on how much laundry and vacuuming I had to do. We need to work smarter, not harder, with our actions based on facts rather than myths.



In short, the easiest way to deal with head lice is not to let it happen at all. I cannot tell you that using repellant spray is a guarantee that you or your child won't get head lice. What I can tell you is that if you use it in conjunction with the Robi-Comb, you'll simply be so much less likely to get it, and extremely likely to catch it before it gets to be a big problem.