Child Prodigy?

Coming across one of your kids reading in this house is not rare. We are all readers in our house, fiction or non-fiction, and we literally have hundreds of books (M used to have over a thousand but had to whittle them down due to lack of space). But today I was really suprised, not by the fact that our youngest was looking at a book, but by what he was reading.

I mean, Steven Hawking is hardly light reading, not your normal bedtime story shall we say. After all, when was the last time your 3 year old asked you for the one about the Black Hole and the bend in Space Time? Yet there he was, chilling out in our bed reading A Brief History of Time. OK, I can forgive him for losing my place, but when I noticed he was on the last few pages, and I am still near the beginning, that is a slap in the face I can tell you.

I can see with a child of this intellect at his age I am going to have a serious run for my money.

Return of the Nit

The wonderful thing about nits and headlice is that they survive - wonderful for the nits that is. As long as even one person in the community has them, they will keep coming back. You send a nit free child to school, they come back not nit free.

And back they have come. So instead of shooting up north to visit family we are doing the nit check and annihilation procedure.

So far Dad has been pronounced clean, J and E show signs of having been got, and we don't know about M yet since she is checking everyone else, but no-one has checked her yet. M is more concerned than the rest of us, partly because she is Mum, and partly because she has long hair - no fun.

The joys of parenthood.

Meanwhile how about some fast facts:

• Head lice are parasitic insects found most commonly behind the ears and near the neckline at the back of the neck.
• The medical term for head lice infestation is Pediculus humanus capitis.
• The life cycle of the head louse has three stages: nit, nymph, and adult.
• The life cycle of a single louse from egg to egg is about 1 month.
• Head lice eggs are called nits.
• Nits take 6 - 9 days to hatch.

For further information visit:

• NHS Direct >
• Head Lice on About.com >
• Head Lice Article >