scratchy

i feel so out of touch with my blog and i do NOT like it. i've got some damn good excuses though. last week i got on a kick and decided to repaint our room and bathroom. we hated the color...the bedroom was maroon (apologies college station) and the bathroom was dandelion yellow. mark was gone to officer school and wasn't here to supervise but assured me i could go a little crazy and express myself. so i did. i'll post pictures when it's all put back together, but the walls are light grey, the doorway is lime green, the bathroom is teal and dark grey...i've done some art projects that i'm pretty proud of, too. can't wait to post pictures of how it all turned out!

so that ate up my time last week...mark came home thursday and we had to drive to arkansas to pick up the boys on saturday, then sunday our whole crew (grandpa, grandma, mark, me, ashlee, kaitlin, jake, aidan, and oliver...that's right. 9 of us. we got some interesting looks.) went to the zoo. it was so much more fun than i thought it would be! grandparents got us memberships, so i have a feeling we'll spend quite a bit of time there this spring and summer. we came home, grilled out, and had a fabulous end to a great day.

and that was the end of the fun. the things that have commenced since sunday are: our main computer crashing and completely virus infected (thanks kids and your video games), our back up computer not working and not opening explorer, (i'm borrowing ashlee's laptop), a sugar ant infestation in the kitchen, and here's the kicker...3 kids with lice. so far.

i was sitting down with a glass of wine after cleaning up dinner on monday (mark was working), and ashlee had just gotten out of the shower and brought me her hairbrush and showed me a little brown bug crawling on it. i immediately dragged her by the hair into the bathroom and checked her thoroughly. i didn't see anything so decided it was no big deal. until i looked back at the brush and saw 2 more little brown bugs. this is my first experience with lice, so i wasn't sure what they looked like. i grabbed a plastic baggie and wrapped the brush up, started picking more thoroughly through ash's hair, and called mark.

(a little background on mark) he is, without a doubt, the neatest clean freak i've ever met. he's worse than my mother. and she's pretty bad. he cleans the entire house every 3 days. and i mean dust, vacuum, sweep, bathrooms, everything. he cleans the kitchen thoroughly after each meal no matter what...he is just super clean and needs to have everything picked up and orderly. this works out wonderfully for me, as i don't have to worry about cleaning much. now as far as i'm concerned, i do laundry when i'm out of underwear and would be completely content to do laundry and dump the clean stuff on the couch and dig through it and pick stuff out to wear until there's nothing left. i hate laundry. i never make the bed, my side of the closet looks like a tornado hit it...i'm just not the most organized person. mark gave me a craft room upstairs and i can't walk across it because there is shit everywhere. paper, punches, scraps, crap crap crap everywhere. pretty sure he convulses every time he walks in there, it may or may not cause him a few hours of sleep a week. but he loves me and assures me it's ok because that's my space and he can shut the door and not look at it.

so anyway, i call mark at work and tell him about the possible lice. he tells his captain he's got to go for half an hour and heads home. in that time i look in the brush drawer and there's little brown bugs EVERYWHERE. i compulsively start twitching and scratching. we confirm the lice and start checking all 5. EFF. ashlee, kaitlin, and jake share that hair brush...luckily my boys were buzzed by nathan last week. when i saw them i hated that he did that and vowed to cut their hair before their time with him from now on because it's not a good look for them. at all. now i'm thankful. they have no hair to brush so i haven't used the brush on them at all. we had some left over lice treatment because my boys had it a few months back. ash and kait had it once before..got it the weekend of their mom's funeral. so i guess if you're going to get lice, this is as good a time as any and far better than their first experience with it. we started the process of purging their rooms of linens, stuffed animals, clothes recently worn, and towels from their showers. mark had to go back to work so i started shampooing all of them, one by one, and set up a movie in the other room so they had something to do while they let it soak. it was past half of their bedtimes at the start of this process. my poor boys were banished to the upstairs tv.

i shampooed, rinsed, combed, gelled, rinsed, combed, and blow dried each one, one by one. kait had it the worst...i found so many live ones and the bathtub and sink were filled with floating lice by the time we were done with her. poor girl. i made a make shift bed upstairs for them because their beds were stripped and sprayed. i finally got everyone in bed by 10 and started cleaning the bathroom. i scrubbed every inch of that damn bathroom with clorox wipes, then doused it all in lysol. i was utterly exhausted and grabbed half a glass of wine and turned on tv to attempt to wind down. i woke up multiple times scratching the hell out of my legs, arms, and hair. (i don't have lice, but feel like i'm covered in them) my dreams were about lice in my bed, lice on the walls, lice everywhere. ew ew ew.

mark was home first thing in the morning and we spent the entire day combing lice out and cutting nits out one by one. yes, we literally separated their hair into sections and searched like monkeys with a pair of scissors and cut hairs individually out when we saw nits. don't EVER say we don't love these kids. ha. we may or may not have started drinking before noon. we found 2 nits in jakes hair and i immediately whisked him outside and proceeded to give him an aidan and oliver special. we were worried he'd look just as bad as them because his head has a ridge along the back like oliver (aidan has a perfectly round and pretty little head...he can pull off the buzzed look better than oliver by FAR), but he actually looks really good. he looks so much older! i think we just saved ourselves a few hundred dollars and found our summer cut.

we thought we'd be responsible parents and call the school to let them know of the lice infestation. turns out that wasn't the best decision. we were told we had to take them (and the box top of the lice treatment i'd thrown away the day before), to the health department and get them cleared. so we called the health department to see if we had to wait a certain amount of time before coming in, and they let us know it would cost $50 a child to be inspected. (because his kids have health insurance. it'd be free if they didn't. why is our system so freaking backwards?!) so we called the school and told them we didn't want to pay $100 to have a nurse look through their hair and asked if the school nurse could just do it. they said that was ok, so we set up a time for this morning to bring them in. i cannot express my frustrateion with this situation at this point. so anyway. everything was washed in hot water and put back on their beds and we had spent all.day.LONG individually picking through their hair and hadn't seen a live one since the morning, so we were relatively confident.

this morning mark found 2 live ones on ashlee and more nits on kaitlin. EFF. called off the school nurse, did some research, and decided to give mayonnaise a chance. (we sent jake to school because we only found 2 nits yesterday, buzzed his hair, and checked him thoroughly this morning and saw nothing. we're getting good at this.) we went to the grocery and got mayonnaise and shower caps, i locked myself in our room to blog while he saturated their hair with mayonnaise. not sad i missed that step at ALL. they have to leave it in for 2 hours, then we'll wash it out, go on an agressive and thorough nit hunt, then i'll braid their hair to keep it up and away. then, most likely, we'll end up in a corner with nothing but a bottle of vodka, while we convulse, twitch, and compulsively scratch.

so here i sit.

i'll be back when the infestation is over.