Is this week over yet?

Wow.

It started out well. Typical Monday, typical Tuesday. Yesterday the girls had a Nutcracker performance at 7PM. The performance was great and the girls were angelic (ahem) as usual. I heard people saying that it was a new conductor and that the tempo was often either too fast or too slow, but I didn't notice. I got the girls at intermission and they were able to watch Act II from the third row in some empty seats that we had scoped out. Grandma Sandy and Imogene were our special spectators last night, and they loved it.

Was a long day, though, as it was pouring rain and the traffic downtown was a beast. Took us over an hour to get downtown. Also, some very bad stuff went down at work on Wednesday, making for quite a stressful day.

Today was the day of Grampy's surgery. I am very relieved to report that he did fine. I was able to spend some time with him today at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and he is recovering. The anesthesia has made him groggy and tired but he came through it well and they believe that the cancer hadn't spread at all.

Before I left for Baltimore, I took the girls to school. A read in the morning announcements (will upload video tomorrow) and did a wonderful job. She and M have been complaining that their heads have been itchy, and I have tried to see if there were any lice on their heads, but never saw any. I decided to take A quickly by the nurse's office for her expert eye. Sure enough, she saw nits in A's hair within 5 seconds. I had no choice but to pull both M & A out of school for the day. We went back home, and thankfully were able to get hold of Imogene and had her come to work early. I also lined up a lice company to come in the afternoon and de-lice the girls. THANK GOD, because the guy was at our house for FOUR HOURS. He spent two hours on each girl's head, going section by section and combing out all of the nits and lice. He only saw baby lice, no big bugs, so it's hard to know where it was all coming from. M had many more lice than A, and A had many more nits than M.

This was quite a production:

• 2 hour de-licing, with hair wet with Pantene conditioner and alcohol;
• Then a bath to rinse out all of the stuff mentioned above;
• Then let their hair dry (one hour);
• Then massage the RID bug killing shampoo into their heads;
• Let the RID sit for 30 minutes;
• Then rinse out the RID, which takes 15 minutes per kid.

Meanwhile, Imogene stripped all the beds, vacuumed (!) the mattresses, and washed and/or heat dried all the pillow pets and other assorted sleeping companions from the beds. (Most of the stuffed animals went into a bag for the next 10 days). Combs, brushes, etc. needed to be cleaned with boiling water and then put in the freezer.

MY GOD.

Tomorrow AM, the girls will get a leave-in conditioner, and are then to wear their hair to school in a single back braid, which protects it from getting more lice. In 10 days they need to use the RID again. And for the next 10 days, we need to do what the lice guy did today – section the hair, and then comb through it for nits and bugs.

I don't even want to address what I spent to have this guy come to the house. Let's just say it is half the cost of the Apple laptop I have been coveting.

What. A. Day.

Daddy returns late tonight from 5 nights gone, and I am very glad.

I have pics and video to share tomorrow but cannot muster the energy to do it tonight.

Thankfully everyone is healthy and sound.