Lice - Houston,TX

This sounds mean and demeaning but I think you are going to have to do nit checks at the door. They can't enter your house until you go through their hair and see they are clean and clear. Really, you can't keep going through the removal process. Do they go to elementary school (will they)? If they find kids with lice there, they don't let them back to school without a check from the school nurse right? At least that's how it used to be.

You don't say how old all the kids are but if you all will be at the school together you may wanna tip off the health clerk at the start of the year.

Head lice is at epidemic proportions across the USA> There's not much that can be done about it over all. Parents fight and fight it but if the parents don't know how to repel them then their kids will get them again and again.

The best thing you can do is get a spray bottle, a smaller one is best so you can change it out each day, put some water in it and add a few drops of Tea Tree Oil. I bought mine at Walmart in the ethnic hair care section. It's by the hair dye's and brushes in our Walmart.

Each morning when you go to brush your child's hair simply spray her hair while styling it. The oil stinks to lice and the oil coats the hair shaft. Their eggs won't stick to it so they die. I do this all the time and my granddaughter hasn't had them in over a year and a half. She is around the same people and just doesn't get lice anymore.

I suggest you go to headlice.org and study up about the proper way to get rid of them. Using pesticides is such a bad way to do this. Those pesticides are not good for anyone.

I did actually use one kind of treatment for head lice a long time ago and it worked really well. It was lice MD. It's not a pesticide but something else.

The site I listed above is a great site for information for all parents. I hope you'll share it with your neighbor. Even if you just say "OH MY STARS!!!! I found the BEST site for treating xxxxx for head lice....I just have to share it with you".

I understand what your going thru. I babysat a little girl next door for a couple of years. I started in August, the end of October I noticed my kids had lice. I told her and suggested she find someone else to watch her girl until we got rid of it. She said that her daughter had had it for a few weeks, BUT never told me. This went on the whole time I babysat her. We got lice 5 times during that time. Every time I got to the point of just telling her to find someone else, she really started trying to get rid of it. It would last for about a month and then it just seemed like she just gave up.
We used a couple of inches of dawn dish soap in a spray bottle and the rest filled with white vinegar. Keep it on for about 30 minutes and then wash out. Plus I washed all of the bedding that day, sprayed down furniture with the Original Listerine.
One thing that did help prevent it was putting several drops of Tea Tree Oil in the shampoo bottle. In fact, every time we did get it was when we had gotten a new bottle of shampoo and I hadn't added the oil yet.
I know that you girl loves to play with them, but you do need to put your foot down, offer to help because I would hate for those other girls to have to go thru that.

Can you tell the mom you are going to do a head check of the nieces before every play time and if the girls don't pass then no playing? Ugh - what an awful situation. Was this going on during the school year? I'm surprised the nurse would let the girls come back without seeing that they were lice-free.

ETA: Shannon and I were typing at the same time because we certainly were thinking along the same lines!

I am a long time teacher and had never gotten them until last year. I tried everything from RX stuff from the doctor to over the counter nothing worked. They kept coming back. Could not figure out where at school I was getting them. Finally starting soaking my head in listerine and sleeping with a shower cap on and we also washed our bedding every night for over 5 months and it finally stopped. Nightmare.

Seems to me the girls are old enough to do something themselves if mom won't help. If I were you, I would treat their heads myself and provide them with new hairbrushes and then go over and tell my SIL that the girls' heads have been treated, and you are happy to wash their bedding and spray their mattresses, etc. yourself. If she balks, tell her unfortunately the girls will not be allowed to visit until you know this has been taken care of.

You need to also understand that it takes about 7 - 10 days or more after infestation before you realize you have lice. So if you think your nieces come one day, and voila lice infestation the next, you are mistaken in where they are coming from. Also, if you didn't get all the lice when you treated, you will think she is re-infested when in fact it's just that one or two wereleft and they have multiplied until you now believe it is a new infestation. I thought my GD kept getting it until I finally realized that I just wasn't getting it completely gone.