We’re taking a deep breath and admitting to something we feel ashamed of. We just got over a bout of lice chez nous. Why the shame? After all, lice don’t discriminate and prefer clean hair to dirty – it’s easier for the scrabulous little beasties to grip onto – and anyone with hair can get them. But the stigma still remains, as does the psychosomatic urge to scratch your head when someone says lice.

There are lots of ways to treat lice from wholly natural ones to possibly toxic (and ineffective) treatments but wet combing hair is the true key to getting rid of lice and nits. However you choose to attack the problem if it infests the heads in your home here are a few things about combating lice we know for sure:

It’ll take up hours and hours of your time. Quite literally. You need to comb the hair of all the infected members in your home and to do a thorough job – and you’ll want to be thorough! This can take an hour or two per head depending on how much hair you’re dealing with. Plus there are the mounds of laundry you’ll do in hot water to kill the bugs. Hint: we ended up hitting the laundromat and doing multiple loads at once, it saved oodles of time. And all the items you can’t wash you have to freeze for 24 hours. And all this goes on for at least two weeks.

You’ll spend a lot of money. At the very least you’ll need to invest in a good lice comb, any treatments you choose to use and a magnifying glass or visor. All this adds up.  As does getting everything that can’t be washed or frozen dry cleaned.

You don’t realize how much your kids rub their hair on the carpets, each other, your furniture and yourself. Until you don’t want them to.

We formulated our plan of attack after finding the site lice911. We opted for a combo of Zap, an insecticide-free treatment that relies on coconut oil and star anis oil to suffocate lice, and frequent bouts of wet-combing after the live lice were dead to get rid of the nits which will re-infest everyone if allowed to hatch.

And we felt a lot less ashamed when we read this great article focusing on the good things about lice – yes there actually are some – from Toronto-based parenting expert Alyson Schafer.

Oh and two last thing we know for sure. First you’ll never feel as close to your simian roots as you do when you’re picking nits out of your kids’ hair. And if you have girls with long hair you will, at some point in the process, consider shaving their heads. We’d recommend resisting this urge, but a nice pixie cut never hurt anyone.

Have you dealt with a bout of lice? How did you treat them? And how long did it take to get rid of them? We’re discussing this on our Facebook Page today.