“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need…” – Mick Jagger
Today, our household was hit by a figurative bombshell. Upon waking up, my wife noticed that our son was scratching his head unusually frequently. My wife inspected. Bingo.
Nits. Headlice. Ugh.
So, diving headlong into a natural remedy book, my wife concocted a dilution of Tea Tree Oil and some other stuff to spray on my kids’ heads, while I frantically ran around the house collecting bedding, clothing, and everything else that had fabric fibres and looked like it would fit in our washing machine.
Not exactly how I planned on spending my Sunday morning.
I don’t handle this kind of stuff very well. Our cats have a recurring flea problem, which drives me crazy. I can’t sit near them and very rarely have them on my lap anymore, unless I know they are flea-free. (It makes me wanna scratch just thinking about it…)
I’m not proud to admit that I got pretty grumpy this morning. A late night fixing a computer (see yesterday’s post) and a lack of food didn’t help, but honestly I can get quite militant about fixing stuff like this the SECOND it appears… which is fairly unrealistic and kinda irritating to everyone else in the household.
Eventually I calmed down, the washing got done, my son’s hair got sprayed, combed, cleaned, de-loused, sprayed, combed, cleaned, de-loused, and sprayed again. My daughter apparently doesn’t have any nits, so her hair remained in the most gorgeous braids all day, and my wife and I kept scratching involuntarily.
Four important side-effects of this (mis)adventure:
1) Our carpets, bedding, and house generally, got the top-to-bottom cleaning treatment. It now sparkles. Win.
2) We cleared out junk in the kids’ room, and from our back balcony. (In my grumpy state, I cleaned and reorganised our back balcony and our storage shed.) They are now far neater and tidier spaces to inhabit. Win.
3) Our daughter realised (while I was in junk-clutter-exterminator-mode) that she could do without a bunch of stuff in her “dress-ups” box, and wardrobe generally. This is HUGE. It is also paving the way for the inevitable “miminalist-isation” we must undergo before the end of next year, so our lives all fit into a bus. Win.
4) As my grumpyness subsided, I realised that I could finally advertise for sale a bunch of baby things we no longer need. (Cot, change table, stroller, pram, backpack, etc.) Thanks to the marvel of Facebook and mother’s classifieds, we have netted $140 already tonight, and have an additional $100 or so due sometime this week. And we have less “stuff”. WIN.
Now, boys and girls, who can guess where I’m going to go from here?
Yep. Time to draw all these threads together, and make it relevant to today’s IQ, and to YOU.
Mick Jagger sang (rather well, actually) “You just might find, you get what you need.” It came from one of my less-than-favourite Rolling Stones albums called “Beggar’s Banquet”. In this instance, today’s quote sums up perfectly the gap between expectation (a nice, lazy family day Sunday) and reality (a frantic, grumpy, nit-exterminating cleaning mission). Further, it tells us that we can often get what we need (less clutter, a sparkly clean house, and some extra cashola), instead.
There you go.
With love,
Israel. xo