I’ve battled with the idea of writing a blog, asking myself all the obvious questions. The toughest one, is of course, “what do I write about in my first post?” Never would I think it would be on the topic I am about to write, but here we are. Welcome to my journey!
Now, I am a mom, I am a wife, and I work, full-time, outside the home. Balancing all of that is hard. Really freaking hard. Often times my job demands my time, and we have to “reschedule” holidays, birthday celebrations so that I can save my days off for things that can’t be rescheduled (like the preschool Grinch party). When Valentine’s Day fell on a Friday, we knew my weekend would be spent at work. But, by some miracle, my husband and I were both off on Monday. Hallelujah, a day off, together, when we could drop the boys at preschool and remember what it was like to just be a married couple, and not two exhausted people chasing kids down to put on underwear.
We planned a day date. There is an outlet mall about 1.5 hours away. We would go shopping, have lunch, come home, and a babysitter would take the boys that evening so we could have a civil, quiet dinner out. So we dropped the boys at preschool, grabbed ourself a coffee, (we’ve been doing Keto, so this was a treat all on its own, but more about that journey another time) and headed on our date. I love to shop, so we arrived at the gates of Heaven, aka the Premium Outlets, and made our game plan for which direction we’d go and what stores we’d hit. I’m a planner, and my husband is a wanderer, so I like to know which stores he’ll potentially be at when he abandons me to go his own way. Right as soon as we walk out the first store, we get the call. THE CALL. The one you worry about when your 1.5 hours away from school. My phone rings, his phone rings. It’s the preschool.
“Um Analiese, gosh, I hate to have to make this call. But, um, Ms. T was looking at your son, and she saw a bug. So she checked him. He has lice.”
Lice. LICE. My baby boy had lice. Remember the part where I said the outlets were an hour and a half away? So much for our day date. So much for our dinner date. So much for balancing being a wife, with being a mom.
In case you are wondering, when your child has lice, you have to clean EVERYTHING. Anything they touch, laid on, looked at the wrong way, everything. We made a stop at the CVS and grabbed the highest strength treatment we could. I lathered up my cootie ridden child, his brother (who did not have it) and myself (also who did not have it. You can never be too safe). Thank the Lord I have boys. A quick head shave shined all the lights on his little infestation, and ensured I got every last one. A quick rub down for the two of them with some Tea Tree Oil (it repels them, NOT a treatment if they already have it) and we’re ready to tackle the mound of laundry.
This adventure left me with some important lessons. The first. Don’t judge other parents. My kids are CLEAN. My husband is a clean freak, they had bathed the night before, and got it anyway. The second, don’t count on your plans. Kids will ruin them anyway. Third, if you can, invest in a washing machine and dryer with a “sanitize” function. For everything we could wash, the washer took care of it, for everything we couldn’t, a spin in the dryer fried all those little buggers. Lastly, make the plan anyway. Set time aside for your husband, for your kids and for yourself. Plans might now work out, but we spent the day laughing anyway.
As my kids say in their new favorite sing-song, “Bye bye buggies, get out of my hair!”
Annie
Mom. Wife. American Life. 