help me solve my NITS mystery

[noonar]

dd1 has had nits tiwce since starting school in september. each time i've seen eggs- dead ones, i'm pretty sure, but no lice.

the investation seems to have gone by itself, each time. i'd always assumed that lice would multiply until treated, not disappear voluntarily!

i realize that a single louse can lay many eggs, then scarper, but surely those eggs would hatch....

anyway, can anyone explain why we have nits but no obvious lice?

also, can anyone suggest a foolproof way of knowing if the eggs are really dead?

tia

white eggs are hatched, brown are waiting to hatch

ok, lady, thanks. i think i may have spotted a couple of brown ones. but last time i waited patiently, but they never did hatch!

not all of them do.

ok, thanks martian. so you could actually have dead brown eggs, then?

best thing to get is a nitty gritty comb.

i would just use a nitty gritty once a week cove the hair with conditioner and comb through with the nitty gritty

i have one already. just bought it. we combed on friday, and i meant to do it again today

Mine have never had nits, and I'm convinced it's because I use lavender oil on their pillows to get them to sleep. I think DS1 might have had some white eggs once. I conditioned and combed like mad, but no nits were ever found. I wonder if they don't like the smell of some people and run away.

snowonder, just saw your post, sorry. i thought you had to do it every 3 days. what a relief.

This happened to me, I found eggs on ds's head but no lice

guess whose head all the lice had moved to, hmm? HMMM?

oh no, poor you! makes me itch, just thinking about it.

If you see something suspicious, wet comb. There is no point in waiting to see if they will hatch. Get into the habit of doing it every week on the same night. Those bath crayons are useful distractions if you do it whilst in the bath.

The nits (eggs) are easier to see because they are white. The lice are much harder to spot as they are often the same colour as the hair. The best way to see them is when you are wet combing with loads of conditioner and they show up against the white stuff.

slight hijack,but are the nitty gritty combs worth getting?

Depends how long your hair is. If it's thick and waist length I wouldn't waste your money.

i have had one good idea that makes combing dds hair easier, that you may wish to note...i use 'leave in' conditioner for combing, then you dont have to rinse it off. makes the process easier.

we've only used the nitty gritty once, but it does seem to remove the eggs too.

How do you know that they are dead...I'm not sure there is a reliable way to tell. And the actual lice themselves are virtually impossible to find without combing. Just put conditioner in her hair (to make it easy to comb), get a normal nit comb and spend an hour every night combing her hair for 2 weeks. (Do this near the sink and use an old tootbrush to clean the nit comb into the sink between combs. You may see the lice against the white of the sink). The first few days you will have lots of eggs and maybe a few lice and by the end hopefully there will be none of either. At the end of the two weeks continue to check her hair for eggs every few days, forever.
In my experience, since the eggs are slightly transparent, they take on the color of the person's hair and therefore vary in color depending on the person they are on, so I wouldn't use color as a way of figuring out if they are hatched or not. Just take them all out.

Also, make sure she goes to school with her hair totally tied back and that she knows not to share hats and hairbrushes with other children.

blimey sofia, thats a lot of combing! not sure i could keep that up.

i guess i thought that i'd be able to sse the lice.

'see'

I've tried a couple of nit/lice shampoo's but then found the absolute best way was conditioner and a good comb (can anyone recommend a really good one for fine hair?) - excellent tip about the leave-in conditioner, now whhhyyyyy didn't I think of that before! (Where's the "doh" emoticon!)
Dd also seems to have nits but no lice, very odd, also they're quite high up near the hair root which would indicate they're recent-ish. She had her hair cut this afternoon and I found myself checking her hair for lice and pulling out nits in the hairdressers but managed to remember where we were and stop before I got us thrown out!

noonar, unfortunately there is no easy way to get rid of lice. You can douse your child's head with lots of poisons, you can leave the lice there, or you can do thorough combing every day for two weeks (gestation period of the lice) until they are gone. Unfortunately, there are a lot of parents who aren't willing to put the time in and that's why there are lice in so many classrooms. Your child's head may take less than an hour (depending on hair type and length), but in my experience, the first time you do it, it takes a while to get the hang of it. And once you do the combing for the 2 weeks and get rid of them properly, you shouldn't have to do it again as long as you do regular monitoring (once a week is probably enough).

I unfortunately experience a year of lice with my stepchildren who had a mother who was unwilling to comb them. Hence, I am well experienced in the elminating of them. Since I got rid of my stepchildren's lice, my two have never gotten them (despite outbreaks in their classrooms), I think because I check their hair on a daily basis and keep my dd's hair in braids whenever she is in public.

i use the conditioner and then wipe the comb onto some kitchen roll which makes it very easy to see whats there,

I recently bought a nitty gritty comb - well worth it - DDs complain far less as they say it doesn't hurt them. I comb every week when I wash their hair just to make sure nothing is lurking. Nitty Gritty comb gets out the eggs whereas other combs just get out the live ones.

We throw money at the problem (dd and me with long thick hair, dp with very curly hair and a sensitive scalp and last, but by no means least, ds, the louse's friend, the county louse sanctuary. We use Hedrin every week on Wednesdays, whether we think we've got them or not. It's non toxic, doesn't smell, works brilliantly - the only downside is the price. I've heard that plain coconut oil works really well, but it's sticky and difficult to wash out. Lice Attack is also very good - give ont=e of them a try.

In my experience, the normal cheap nit combs that you get at the local chemists work just fine to get out all the eggs. I don't think any of the chemicals kill the eggs, so you are never really getting rid of the problem by dousing with poisons, just getting rid of current live ones, but as soon as the eggs hatch you get new live ones and if your child gets reinfected at school they could lay eggs in between treatments. You really just need to comb comb and comb again for 2 weeks and then check regularly after that. It really does work!!!