Laura didn’t intend to take a five day break in between Part I and Part II of The Lice Story, but hey, that’s what happened and she is, as always, very sorry about the lapse. She wishes she had a whole long list of interesting things she did which caused the lapse but again, as usual, she has nothing much to report. Laura’s been working, working, working toward her September 1st deadline and she’s really making progress.

But back to the lice.

So after Laura spent 9 hours combing the bugs and the nits out of Ben’s hair and piling up several hundred dollars worth of swearing, she realized that if there was even one single nit in his hair come Monday morning, the camp nurse would send him home, and their expensive second session of camp would be wasted. The other thing that would be wasted would be the working-time his expensive second session of camp was buying Laura, and so when her sister-in-law Colleen called and Laura told her about her predicament, Colleen sprang into action.

You need to call a professional, Colleen said, after whipping her into a frenzy of how-impossible-it-was-going-to be-to-get-rid-of-their-lice-problem-herself. Colleen was a big believer in calling professionals, and Laura had to admit, when she started to think of the lose-lose scenario — doing it herself, missing a nit, having Ben sent home from camp, getting nothing done that week, missing her deadline, losing the house, moving into an apartment in a shitty neighborhood, having their cars repossessed and defaulting on their credit cards — Laura could go on and on and on since she has the equivalent of a graduate degree in negative catastrophe thinking — she began to see Colleen’s point:

Laura’s entire future was hanging in the balance. She had to call in a professional.

Laura had told Colleen on the phone that several years ago one of her blog-mom friends had suffered a terrible bout of lice at the middle school her son went to — she and her three kids have huge Jewish hair — sometimes referred to as “Jew-Fros” — and after several attempts at delousing, the lice were still there. Which is when she called someone named Helen The Nitpicker.

Laura had thought she was kidding way back when — in fact, she remembers chuckling at the thought of a professional nitpicker — but Lisa was very serious: there was a women in Boston who was a professional nitpicker and she and her service had been written up in various papers in Boston over the years. Lisa said she cost a fortune but she was worth it, since without her she knew they’d never get rid of the lice and her kids would never be let back into school. Laura also remembered thinking what a JAP she thought Lisa was — calling in a professional nitpicker!!

But once Laura called Lisa and got Helen the Nitpicker’s number, she couldn’t leave a message for her fast enough.

Unfortunately, Helen The Nitpicker wasn’t calling back, though Colleen was, and when Laura told her by noon that Saturday that she still didn’t have a professional coming, Colleen took matters into her own hands and found a lice removal service that would come to Laura’s house that afternoon. The company — Lice Treatment Center — was based in tony Fairfield, Connecticut and boasted that it was started by two high-powered women (one a Harvard educated pediatrician, the other a former Manhattan real estate agent with a bunch of kids) and that they used only all-natural non-chemical products they’d formulated themselves (with ingredients like the natural lice-killer tea-tree oil). So after a quick conversation with Liz — the co-owner in Connecticut — Laura was told that Stephanie, their Boston-based person, would come to her house later that afternoon. All Laura had to do was pick this Stephanie up at the nearby T-stop when she arrived.

Laura was relieved, and as excited as she could possibly be at the prospect of spending a bloody fortune for someone to check Ben’s head, and her own, and Brendan’s — it was, of course, one of the only beautiful Saturday afternoons of the entire summer, with the sky bright blue and the air cool and devoid of humidity — and so when the call came from Stephanie that she was almost there, Laura jumped in the car and drove over to the T stop. Sitting there in her car, looking out the window and watching the Green-Line train pull down the tracks and stop and all the handful of passengers slowly file out, Laura squinted into mid-day sunshine for someone who looked like a nitpicker:

Someone old and dumpy and serious looking.

Because, if you’re like Laura, you’re assuming: nitpicker: unattractive. Or, nitpicker: homely and middle-aged. You’re not expecting NITPICKER: 5′8″ GORGEOUS CURVACEOUS BUXOM 24-YEAR-OLD BRUNETTE WHO’S ACTUALLY REALLY INTELLIGENT AND REALLY NICE.

But that’s what Stephanie The Nitpicker was. 5′8″ gorgeous, curvaceous, buxom, 24-year-old brunette who was really intelligent and really nice.

I mean, Laura asks you: What are the chances?? Seriously! What are the chances?!?

Of course, in typical men-have-it-easier fashion, Brendan’s head was fine. And let’s just say that when Stephanie pronounced Brendan to be nit-free, he was clearly disappointed.

And so, despite the fact that Laura could have bought like 3 iPods, 2 iPhones, and dinner for 12 at The Palm for what she spent on six hours of professional lice removal, she’s glad that she had piece of mind that quickly: by the time Stephanie was finished after eight that Saturday night, and after Laura and Ben drove her home to Cambridge and then had dinner at Ben’s favorite restaurant — Bertucci’s – with their respective now-lice-free heads full of a proprietary mixture of tea tree oil and olive oil and God knows what other all-natural ingredients — they returned home knowing — or feeling almost very certain — that they were completely and utterly lice free.

And who needs iPods and iPhones and fancy dinners when you have piece of mind like that?