Thirteen, especially on Halloween, seems like a very important birthday to me. We wanted to make it special for the Lone Star Girl. We considered big party options - like a dance at our house with boys, even - but she decided she still wanted a slumber party. I allowed her to invite a truly insane number of girls for our tiny house and we bought all the black decorations with skull motif that her little goth heart could want.
Then.
On Thursday, I picked the Lone Star Baby up from school, intending to take her to the Lone Star Girl's school for the Halloween festival that the Lone Star Girl's theatre department was putting on as a fundraiser. However, in the bright sunlight of the playground, I saw...black stuff. In the Lone Star Baby's hair. I had seen debris of this sort before. Last year - when she brought home lice. EEK!!!!! I took her home and treated her with Nix and combed through her hair with the nit comb, only finding debris, but it was that sort of debris. We treated the rest of us and picked through our heads late into the night, finding nothing that was not ambiguous. We hauled all the bedding, etc. out to the garage for washing and drying in high heat. We lysol-ed the cars.
We canceled the party.
Even though we were careful and even though we did send the Lone Star Baby back to school for her Halloween carnival the next morning after treatment and combing (with full disclosure, of course), having a bunch of girls sleep in and around our furniture that soon after an outbreak seemed to be asking for trouble. I felt just horrible about it and I know the Lone Star Girl was sad, but she was very sweet about it. We tried to make the weekend as special as we could for her, given that large portions of it had to be taken up with extreme laundry and with the daily combing out of everyone's hair, just in case we missed anything.
There were presents on her birthday morning and there was pizza for supper and later trick-or-treating with the neighborhood kids and erstwhile neighborhood kids and one came over for cake and sorbet afterwards. On Saturday, we took her out to lunch and her auntie took her out to a movie and we watched a DVD at night after the combing rituals. Today, I fixed a special brunch and took her to the mall to get a second piercing in her ears.
I still feel bad, though. She really deserved a better birthday.
No comments:
Post a Comment