Again with the cooties

Poor little Miss.

She just can't seem to repel the Louse Invasion.

So this Sunday we huddled inside against the nasty wet cold, I got in a steamy tub full of soapy water - the Girl likes her bathwater on the scalding side of hot - and scrubbed her little head thoroughly. After enough mermaid play I lifted her out, towelled her dry, and raised the shears above her head.Before you could say "Rapunzel" little Miss had lost half her shiny black hair.

Luckily for us we'd been preparing her for the moment for several days, reassuring her that it would grow back, explaining how we needed to trim her crop so that the Good Medicine could whack the Bad Bugs and stop them from making her head itch.So she was a very Good Little Girl and ended up with the appallingly cliche' Adorable Chinese Moppet Bowl Cut; she looks like she stepped off the package of some awful La Choy industrial-grade dinner. Sweet-and-sour pork, probably.

But that wasn't the idea. The idea was the civilized version of the Shaved Head And Purple Nit Paint of my youth; the idea was Death to Lice, and the Little Miss' defoliated dome worked like Agent Orange on a second-growth forest in the Ia Drang Valley. The little boogers got napalmed, and then Mojo went in behind the airstrikes with the tooth-comb ground assault and combed out the stay-behind ambushes and louse-egg booby traps.Mind you, everything has its cost. For us it was two anxious hours hovering over the Girl ensuring that the vile louse-shampoo stayed out of her "nose, eyes, mouth, and vagina" (according to the directions on the package. Who the hell goes around sticking louse shampoo in their lovely lady bits? Unless you're stupid enough to use this stuff on CRAB lice, which it very clearly tells you not to. Honestly, just when you think you've plumbed the depth of human inanity...). The pink headband was a means to keep the stuff off her face.Anyway, the entire effort seems to have been worth it. So far, Little Miss appears louse-free. And her mother does, too, since after several hours of furtive scratching (entirely sympathetic, IMO) Mojo dosed herself, too.

So here she is with her mom, both of them squeaky clean American Girls without a scintilla of nit between them.