My hair stinks. I rather hoped washing it this morning would cure it, but I am very aware that it still stinks. We got ‘the cure’ for the nits yesterday. A bunch of little bottles; the contents of which needed to be rubbed into dry hair – so we did. It took Louise long enough to get it as well – she went down to the health centre & then off to the pharmacist who needed proof that nits were present. No nit combs though… they gave her a leaflet though – had plenty of them. Louise had to go home to use our comb to extricate another & we all went down to the pharmacist again when I got home.

Bottles of potion collected we took a diversion to the park for half an hour or so – pushing Jack on the swings, spinning on the roundabout & watching Eve cope with climbing the slide & positioning herself to come down (she sits before she has her legs in position, so she has to pull her legs round from under her… not a trick she will be able to do as she gets older – flexibility of toddlers).

Jack is reluctant to play out at the moment. It could be that he is afraid of midges – he already associates the nit biting with midges… something we need to dispel – midges fly head lice can do nothing but crawl. Louise suspects that there is something else troubling him about playing out at the moment though – perhaps some of the bigger kids have scared him… It’s so difficult to tell, really. It’s like he wants the assurance, when he does play out, of being on home ground. It does make you think that there’s a motive that he is not wholly telling about his reluctance to play out. Parents worry.