Sunday evening, after having spent the whole day with our faith community up in the mountains over an hour’s drive away, Darwin, our six kids and I came tumbling home down the long gravel road quite joyfully but generally exhausted to the bone after such a demanding week with the arrival of Gabriela.

But rather than shuffling everyone off to shower and head to bed early, I knew the day could not come to a close until one last assignment was tackled: lice.

Although we had won several battles against lice in the last year and a half, it seemed as though we were losing the war. Just about the time everyone combed out that last louse, some neighbor kid would come to visit or enter in homeschool or join choir or one of Gleny’s classmates at her school would have lice and suddenly we would all be infected all over again.

We had invested in more than a couple dozen bottles of chemical lice shampoo, Vaseline to remove the eggs, special fine-toothed combs, the works, but here we were once again facing the same problem.

So I decided to try a home remedy that worked for me while studying abroad in Argentina, where I had been infected with lice after working in a kids’ soup kitchen: Mayonnaise.

I lined up our three eldest girls in front of the tiny mirror in the kids’ bathroom and revealed the largest container of Mayonnaise they had ever seen. I began explaining how they could each attempt to apply the substance to their own hair, but if little drops of Mayonnaise started dripping on the counter, then I would do it for them.

Little did any of us know, but the simple treatment turned into over an hour of rowdy fun, and Mayonnaise ended up everywhere – on the bathroom walls, all over our clothes, on the floor, up my nose and on the handle of our house’s front door as we all darted outside toward the end of the escapade to begin running around our large front lawn.

So here are the photos that Darwin took as I laughed and told him to get the camera. He reluctantly left his splay of sheet music at the wooden table in our living room and captured the following photos…

Then things really got out of hand when someone’s finger went up my nose! At the time I didn’t know which of the three was the culprit, until I later reviewed the pictures. The evidence speaks clearly enough: it was Jackeline!