Head Lice Scare – Welcome to the neighborhood!

With the best of intentions, I set out in our new neighborhood, and I found the park and met the parents of a few lovely suburban children I hoped my kids would become friends with. I was especially successful at matchmaking my five-year-old son with a lovely little six-year-old girl with green eyes and a gracious manner, who enveloped my shy boy in her warm, ceaseless chatter. Her hair was gorgeous—long and curly, just the color of rain-soaked wheat that smells so good after a storm. I made a remark to her mother about her beautiful hair, and her mom shuddered as she dropped this bombshell on me.
“I was afraid we were going to have to cut it all off. She got head lice last week.”

I reacted as any mother would. I cringed and made an instinctive grab for my son, fighting back the urge to snatch him away from the infected one and run immediately to the nearest decontamination facility to have his scalp treated with radiation and chemicals to prevent the spread of the dreaded (disease?) pest to the rest of the family. Not to mention what his father would say if I sent him back with a head full of critters!

With a nervous laugh, I asked, “Oh? Head lice, did you say? Oh my, that must have been terrible. What did you treat it with?” And did you get rid of it before she wrapped her sweet little arms around my boy and gave him such a great big hug?

The good news is, head lice treatment has come a long way since I was a kid (and the better news is, my son apparently escaped contamination). I remember when the only treatment option was Qwell, which was rumored to cause seizures if you left it on your hair too long—and what squeamish mother didn’t leave it on just a little bit longer than the instructions said, just to be sure?

Turns out, pesticide shampoos are not the only means of treating head lice. In fact, chemical treatment shampoos should be a last resort. Over-use of these products have produced strains of head lice that are resistant to them and much harder to kill. Even if you do use one of these to treat your child’s lice, it won’t do the trick by itself.

If your child gets head lice, take consolation from the fact that clean heads are more likely than dirty ones to catch them. Lice eggs attach easier to clean hair than to dirty hair. The only absolutely effective way to get rid of head lice is to comb out all the eggs. Even if you use a lice-killing shampoo to kill the live bugs, you will continue to have head lice unless you remove each and every egg from the child's hair. They say those special lice combs work quite well. They’re just regular combs with teeny-tiny gaps between the teeth so that individual hair strands pass through the gap, allowing the comb’s teeth to grab the lice egg and pull it off the hair shaft.

The most commonly recommended way of treating head lice is to use a gel egg-remover product, which is nontoxic and not a harsh chemical like the pesticide shampoo, and then use a lice comb throughout the hair. The egg remover gel makes the hair easier to comb through and makes the eggs detach from the hair shaft better.

During a “lice scare,” such as when lice has been found at school or when a sibling or friend has been infested, braid the hair and/or use hairspray to make your child’s hair less a

ppetizing to the nasty little critters. Make sure your child understands that he or she must not share hairbrushes, hair accessories, or clothing with other children. This includes coats!

The most important thing of all is to be honest. If you discover head lice on your child, notify the school and the other parent. This can be an incredibly embarrassing phone call to make, but it is absolutely essential. It is critical for your child’s other family members to undergo treatment or precautions, and the school has to be able to notify other parents.

If your child does get head lice, be sure to check all other family members, including adults. It is better to be safe than sorry!

AAAaaaaayyy!!!!

Y'all remember the Fonz?

Crazy, I've been thinking about Fonzie for days now. The boy got a leather jacket for his birthday. From his grandmother, of course. It's a gorgeous jacket, the kind only a grandmother would buy for a kid like mine. I cringe when I look at it and realize what's in store for that poor jacket.

Especially since the boy adores it. Last night he informed me that he's never taking it off, and indeed he slept in it. So now we have the Romo Cowboys jersey and the leather jacket, both of which the boy has decided are mandatory clothing at all times. Underwear and pants are optional. And sometimes, for variety, he likes to wear the AC/DC style stocking cap on top of his girlie-length blond curls.

My boy has established quite a definitive look for himself. I hope you can imagine it because I dare not take a photograph and share it with you. It is too frightening.

Anyway, the fondness he has for his leather jacket—I was thinking the other night that it reminds me of something… what is it? Where do I know this from, this form of love for a leather jacket—ah, Fonzie!!

Yeah, so now I've been drenched in memories of 70's TV and a man who defined cool for generations to come. I can see him so clearly in my mind, can't you? He's the guy who inspires confidence by constantly thrusting his thumbs in the air in a "I'm alright, you're alright, man, it's alright," gesture while drawing out the first letter of the alphabet in a long, relaxed syllable that suggests there is absolutely nothing at all to worry about. He's the guy who's so good looking that he sometimes doesn't even have to comb his hair, so perfectly does it lay in its 1950's style mounds and swirls. He's the guy who can summon ladies from yards away with the simple snap of his fingers, or make a jukebox play a love song with the flick of his fist against the side. He can jump his motorcycle over a bunch of trashcans or jump over a shark on water skis.

So I told the boy, "You know, I used to know a guy who loved his leather jacket as much as you do. His name was Arthur Fonzarelli and he was extremely cool."

I love it when I can share the 70's with my son. The first thing he wanted to learn on the guitar was "Smoke on the Water." (and he did!) I told him all about KISS and showed him pictures and vids on Youtube. "They were pretty cool too," the boy's guitar teacher told him.

"Yeah, but they're all dead," he said.

"What? Gene Simmons is dead? No! What makes you think that?"

"Well, they lived way back in the olden days. Like Martin Luther King and Theodore Roosevelt."

Gee whiz, does he realize that *I* lived during the same olden days as KISS and Fonzie and Paul Simon, all those guys he admires but thinks are now dead of old age?

I learned that there were 255 episodes of Happy Days and 4 spin-offs. Can you name them? "Joanie Loves Chachi" is the only one I can remember—oh no, wait, "Laverne and Shirley." What else? I think "Mork" may have been a Happy Days spin-off, right? One more… anybody know it?

This latest mind excursion of mine has been quite entertaining. I just finished reading an article that explains why Fonzie is a Jungian representation of Jesus Christ. And guess what…he's not dead, he turned 62 this year.

It being HOT in Topeka

I have a tendency to absorb the speech patterns of others. Accents, word choice, phrase structure--I tend to pick these things up from what I read or whom I talk to. When I've been with my family you can hardly understand me, I sound like a total redneck. And you remember, there for a while last November I started to develop one of those fake Madonna-British accents when I went to London. It's not intentional, I just can't help it.

Presently I'm editing a ms (that's jargon for "manuscript") written by a fellow for whom English is clearly a second language. So I frustrated to finding myself thinks insides my head like this ways, and even I dream it last night, some strange Northern European heavy accent I not even heards before. God helps me, please.

To make matters worse, 600 of the 900 servers I support for IBM are located in Topeka. Lately we've been having a lot of meetings about Topeka, as the mucky-mucks are sitting up now, looking around, blinking their precious innocent little doe eyes and saying "Where are we going and why are we in this hand-basket?" These Topeka meetings have created in me an insane impulse to shout "It's HOT in Toe-peeeeeka!!" or "I'm a hot toe-picker!" and then just laugh madly. I swear to you. I actually did say it during one meeting this week. I think I've had too much Nyquil.

Anyway, here's why. My son's been home sick, giving me Cartoon Network as background noise while I work this week. Subliminal messages...I was baffled and hadn't a clue why I developed city-specific Tourrette's Syndrome causing me to yell "toe-picker!" against my will and better judgement every time my clients say the word Topeka.

Then I found this and it all became clear to me. (And now I'm also a Bloo nut. He's the coolest cartoon ever.)
This makes me laugh every single time I hear it!

Glioblastoma

Sounds like something fun, doesn’t it? Havin’ a “blast”?

It’s a different kind of “blast.” It’s more like an explosion, like TNT or an atomic bomb, instead of a party.

Tarot symbolism uses the Tower to represent this sort of thing. The thing that comes hurtling into your life from a clear blue sky, a thunderbolt of change that just leaves you gobsmacked. The Tower is discovering that you’re pregnant at the age of 46, just weeks away from your youngest child’s high school graduation. Then finding out it’s twins. The Tower is falling in love when you least expect it and don’t particularly want it. The Tower is losing your job the same week you close on a new house and your kid goes off to college. The Tower is when your house burns down and there’s nothing left but starting over.

Or a brain tumor. The Tower is a brain tumor that grew there silently, maybe over years of time, and you never knew it was there until you started having headaches and dizziness and blurred vision. And then, after you discover the brain tumor is there, you can’t ever go back to being that person who has headaches sometimes but never heard of the word “glioblastoma.”

The Tower is when this happens to your son and you are helpless and all you can do is watch him suffer.

The good news is…primary brain cancer does not typically metastacize. It doesn’t usually spread itself in generous helpings all throughout the body like other forms of cancer.

The bad news is…one year life expectancy for glioblastoma is only 29%. Ten year life expectancy is 2.3%.

The Tower is not a merciful card. For me, it is a sober reminder of what really matters, for do we ever think about how much something matters until it occurs to us we might lose it?

Chillin' the Most

When I posted this blog, I was obviously feeling very proud of my son and very high on the play, feeling so very positive about the experience as a whole. Unfortunately, things didn't stay so positive. While I'm still proud of the boy, he created problems for himself that I truly hope both he and I can learn from. I extend to the cast a heartfelt "thank you" for any patience, help, or tolerance you've extended to the littlest cowboy. He will remember this experience and all of you for the rest of his life. I personally am starting to hope I'll forget. (just kidding!)

Preview night, and the boy was a champion. I was using a borrowed digital camera that would not at all accept any form of movement in its subjects, so the only pics I got of my future Broadway star are the ones where he's standing still. Just so you know, he dances and sings too. ;)

I bet you'll hear my whistle blowin' when my train rolls in

The boy has also been attending summer band camp this week at Creative Soul in Watauga. Really cool place, the kids get to form a band, choose an instrument, write a song, learn other cover songs, rehearse, and then perform a gig on Friday evening to show what cool rock and rollers they are. The boy chose to play the drums, and you know what, he sounds surprisingly good. When he plays the drums in the next room from where I'm working in my office, it actually sounds like there's someone in there playing a particular drum riff and not like someone fell down the stairs while carrying snares and cymbals. When I picked him up at band camp today, he was humming the song above and told me that's what they'd learned today. Bon Jovi, man, is that right on or what? My boy knows how to play my favorite Bon Jovi song on the drums. So we sang that song together in the car, all the way over to Lewisville where he was scheduled to be a cowboy on stage for the next three hours but without the steel horse he'd ride. (Tomorrow is the actual opening.)

I once was lost, but now I'm just blind

I've told you how thrilling it all is (and I am very proud, yes) so here's the down side: me and the boy, we don't sleep anymore. For the past two months, it's been nightly rehearsals in Lewisville, and we never get home before midnight. This week, with band camp too, we're up at the crack to get ready, and I drive him to camp, then pick him up and hurry to rehearsal, home at midnight. Since my evening home is now the theater, I have to give up a lot of sleep to get things done so I can start over again tomorrow. We're exhausted but having a blast. I'm sure there will be more theater to come for him, but he says he wants to go back to the other side of acting for a while, commercials and TV. Good boy. A fraction of the time commitment, and he'd actually get paid!

Here are some interesting things I've learned:

1) Nearly every grown-up in the show, including myself, behaved at times more like a child than the children themselves.

2) I learned the terms blocking, marking, and striking. But I'm not going to tell you what they are.

3) Theater people are very theatrical. Lordy, the drama that goes on in the greenroom, behind the curtains, in the prop rooms--enough to upstage whatever's going on out on the set!

4) Costume changes and tiny places to perform them in the intervals between cues (maybe minutes) have given theater people a completely liberal and free attitude toward nudity. I'm not all that hung up on modesty myself, so I didn't even notice it after the first rehearsal...until one particular gentleman in Oklahoma! walked by me just the other day wearing his unders, and I did the most comical double take! I decided he must use his boxer briefs to carry his pet python around with him because there's no way all that he had going on there was HIM!! Yeah, okay, I had to look a third time, but I did determine (I'm pretty sure) that it actually IS him. I'm not kidding---scary big.

Oklahoma! will go on for the next four weeks, twelve more shows. Week night rehearsals are over, thank God, but we'll be there with cowboy hats and boots on every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday till early August. Y'all come see us, y'hear?

I wanna be a Cowboy baby

Let's take all our clothes off and kiss and kiss and kiss

I overheard a kind of funny conversation the other day between the boy and his friend, the other boy. As I walked past his bedroom, I heard them talking about sex, so I had to listen in and see what they had to say.

The boy: Sex is when people take off all their clothes and kiss and kiss and kiss.

Other boy: No, sex is when you put your finger in a girl's, you know.

The boy: Balls?

Other boy: No, her pee-pee. You put your finger in her pee-pee and that means you're having sex.

The boy: She'd slap you if you did that.

Other boy: No, they like it.

The boy: No, girls would slap you for doing that.

Other boy: No, really, girls like it. It makes them go crazy!

The boy is seven, while the other boy is almost nine, which might explain why he has a more technical idea and a more accurate sense of what sex is than my son does.

Gee, can you remember that? The curiosity and total ignorance we once had about this super-significant, massively secret but at the same time all over the place, mysterious act called sex? At some point, sex became so ubiquitous and commonplace it's easy to imagine we were born knowing all about it. I remember, though, when I was a kid, trying to find out without daring to ask anyone who would actually know--what the heck is it and why do people do it, and especially why do people talk about it all the time?

Ah, then puberty brings enlightenment, and it isn't long before we're adults and so jaded that there isn't a sex act performed anywhere on earth that would shock us.

Don't Fear the Reaper

My fairies are moving out, sadly, and they bestowed upon the boy a gift this weekend past, a goodbye present: an impossibly soft, kitten-sized black bunny named Jack, who loved to be held and played with. So enraptured with Jack was my son that they became inseparable. If Jack was not clutched in a loving deathgrip by the boy, he was snuggled up in a ball against the boy's chest while he watched cartoons or hopping happily around at the boy's feet or on the boy's bed while the boy slept, quietly munching lettuce and leaving chocolate M&M's to show his appreciation and devotion.

After a day or so, the boy seemed to understand the need to be gentle and delicate when handling the bunny, and I no longer had to remind him, "Take it easy!" and "Use both hands!"

This morning, he asked if he could bring Jack in the car with us while we ran errands. Sure, why not? In the post office, people said, "Aww..." and paused to pet the bunny. At Lowe's I glanced over to see Jack hopping along obediently at his feet while he danced around in the aisle. In the car, he rode like a little fluffy black lapdog, perfectly content.

I sat at my desk working this afternoon, and the boy came running in, crying. At seven, he does not cry lightly but only when something is dreadfully, seriously in a bad bad way, like when he has to get a shot at the doctor's office or when the sleep-over he and his friend have been planning for days gets canceled because his friend got grounded for telling his mom to shut up.

"Mom! Something happened to Jack!"

I looked up in time to see his horrified expression. "What? What happened?"

"Jack's dead!" he cried, dumping for dramatic effect onto my lap the still-warm carcass of Jack the bunny, now indeed, unquestionably deceased.

Oh my.

Have you ever been deeply engrossed in your work one minute, only to find yourself staring at a dead animal on your lap the next and faced with the task of comforting a near-hysterical seven-year-old whose understanding of death comes from Star Wars movies and Super Mario?

"I tried to heal him," the boy said, looking at me with wide, scared eyes, clearly hoping that I could do something, that I could "heal him."
I was unsure whether to join the boy in woeful tears of loss, or launch into a philosophical discussion of the absurdity of life and the certainty of death, or perhaps lecture the boy ("See! This is what happens when you don't take care of your things!")

But, of course, what I wanted more than anything was the power to resurrect poor Jack and bring him back for my son, who had done nothing but eat-sleep-poop-walk-play-dance-talk-laugh-and-sing black bunny for the past three days.

Turns out, he dropped him. He was holding him "with both hands, Mom, I promise, I really swear!" and Jack started squirming, clawed the boy and escaped his grip, only to fall to his doom. A broken neck, I suppose, is the official cause of death.

Being faced unexpectedly with comforting the grieving boy, I was also suddenly aware that I needed to figure out what to do with poor Jack's remains. Must I really perform a proper burial, a bunny funeral, right now in the middle of a busy afternoon? Or can I simply dispose of poor

Jack as efficiently as possible, say a few kind words of farewell as I wrap him in newspaper and dump him in a trashbag at the curb? It was clear as I sat there blinking at the dead bunny, I needed to decide quickly.

Now, hours later, the boy is still mourning. "I lost my best friend," he said to me with eyes most solemn and forlorn just a few moments ago. "I miss Jack."

Our Taco puppy appears to be taking Jack's passing better than we; he wants to play. And after a heavy sigh, the boy shuffles off with his dog to find the stuffed dolphin they like to play fetch with.