Tea Tree Oil, Killing Lice and Smelling Nice

My mother ran her own daycare  for years while I was in elementary school. There are stories she’s told me about the number of times she had to battle lice- I’m talking several times in a year! It was a nightmare!

Fast forward 19 years and now I’ve got my own kids and I am the captain fighting the war on head lice.

My first (and so far only) battle just happened to begin ONE DAY before I went into labor with our third child, and they seemed to come out of nowhere. It was like they didn’t have them one day and then BAM! Infested!

So I’m rampaging around the house stripping all of the beds, gathering every stuffed animal, pillow, and blanket and throwing them into the washing machine. I vacuumed the mattresses, carpets, rugs, and every inch of every cloth anything they may have ever touched in their lives (I was on a warpath, after all).

I then deluged the girls’ hair from root to tip in olive oil and they had NEVER had their hair cut in all their 6 and nearly 3 years, so that was fun. I then washed their hair a few times and it was still crazy heavy because oil, that’s why.

That alone knocked out probably 95% of the lice. Then I sat for hours combing through a few hairs at a time to get the nits out. This process killed off about another 1% of the initial infestation after I had first noticed it.

But by the next day I knew my baby was on her way and I still had 4% to eradicate before I would bring my new baby home. Out came my Essential Oils Handbook and the oil recommended was Tea Tree oil. So I mixed up a spray of water and about 50 drops of the oil and spritzed their hair until it was dripping all over the place and then proceeded to comb out their hair again (which was made infinitely harder due to the contractions every few minutes), but we were down to about 1%!

My parents had to take them late in the night as Joshua and I finally headed to the hospital and my mother was concerned about bringing Eternity home to ANY lice so she got Nix and gave the girls one treatment before we picked them up on our way home a couple of days later.

I combed through and found a few dead-looking nits but no more live crawling ones! The next time I went to the store I found Nature’s Gate Tea Tree shampoo and conditioner and we haven’t had them back since!

But do you know what’s crazy about lice? Of all the blood-sucking spiteful parasites like fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and lice… they are the absolute least threatening. We hear in the news every spring and all throughout summer to be aware of ticks and mosquitos spreading worse and worse diseases and did you know that it was fleas that spread the black plague?

Lice, though? They are not known to spread anything. They can’t jump or fly and they basically glue their handful of eggs to the hair shaft, so “all you have to do” is comb them out! Tedious, but fairly “simple”…

So, you know, not the worst, but they still suck. And I still hate them with a passion.