FAQ : How do I desprinkle my house of Barbie hair glitter?

Credit picture: Ann Post

I have been reading a lot of articles about familes with kids getting LICE. It scares me.  I really dont want to mess around with delousing my whole household or spending an hour every day combing through hair and looking for nits.  Or taking showers using mouth wash as shampoo (urban legend says this kills them) or even harder stuff like Crisco or Kerosene.  Yes, I have read that too.  Ugh, I dont even want to post a picture of the lice.  I was going to, but instead I had to put up something positive and nice, hence the cozy winter picture of a cottage in the woods. Nice. Not lice. 

I was very lucky not to have this condition when I was growing up.  We had a fleas infestation from our dog, but in fact I never even heard of lice until I came to Europe.  Well, in fact before that I read about lice in KIDS during World War 2 who got the critters from sleeping in hay in the barn.  I assumed it was a condition of ancient history or of "poor folks", sort of like tuberculosis.  

Truthfully I have not had the "pleasure" of having the louse experience and I thank my Lucky Stars for that, or the God above.  Though I am not sure it is God that is keeping my family from getting lice, though if it is, I thank the heavenly Father.  That is awfully kind.

That said, I have NOT been spared a 21 st century condition which while not as bad as lice, is certainly up there with menaces such as people talking too loudly on their mobile phones in public or in the park while they are supposed to be watching their kids, or teenagers smoking on the corner under our apartment,  That one REALLY gets my goat.

Barbie for kids with loss of hair due to cancer or diseases

I am talking about the menace of BARBIE R hair glitter.  Maybe even worse than lice  as you can not get rid of them to the best of my knowledge.  They will be there when you sell the house.

Not to make this into an X rated blog, but I have learned that a healthy male puts out at least 40 million spermatozoa in a 2ml semen ejaculation.  Now those little guys are microscopic and all 40 million can easily be wiped up in a little puddle with a Kleenex or easily washed off the hand or just as easily be spit out or swallowed from the mouth.  But imagine if those 40 million were each as big as a pin head and then were put into a little vile and then dumped on said Barbie`s R head, but in fact not dumped on the head, but spread all over. 

Just like sperm, these goobers have some sort of mobility and quickly and easily torqued throughout  said household.  First they disperse in groups of 100 000 or so.  Then 10 000.... down to 1 or a couple anywhere in the apartment from our bed to under the bathtub to a couple on my face.  If I clean one off one side of my face, there is another on my other cheek.  I ride the street car and if people look at me, I wonder if the sunlight caught a sparkle in my eye that they are looking at.   

Now don't get me wrong, most certainly this is a "Western" first world complaint and I know there are bigger problems in the world, no doubt, but if every household with kids were afflicted with this nefarious condition, it would be a national calamity.

plus size Barbie R

My attention was first called to this problem a month or two ago after we got said Barbie R for a present.  I noticed some sparkles in the kitchen on the table and on the floor and just assumed it was some sugary ingredient my wife was glazing on a sweet role or something.  The sparkle was contained.  I wiped it up easily, so I thought it was under control.  Simple.  You can wipe the stuff up.  Besides, the kids didn't really take to the Barbie R doll. 

Huh.  If I had only known. I would have thrown said vile of glitter right then into the garbage and let the local land fill people deal with the problem of 40 million sparkles.  I didn't know.  The problem did not become apparent.

Whoa is to me as this last weekend, my older daughter  gave Barbie R a hair wash (who incidentally bought the Barbie R with said sparkles as a present with her own money for her younger sister.  You know who the present was really for, and who is playing with it right?).   And then she put the sparkles in her hair after I helped her blow dry Barbie R s hair.  I am rolling my eyes if you could see me, but it was fun(ny).  I looked at the sparkle and opened the vile and I opened it wrong because it looks like a lipstick container, but, well, a lot of sparkles fell all over the girls room.  Crap.  Then my younger daughter opened the vile and sprinkled the sprinkles on Barbie R s hair in large doses.  Too large.  It was all over the rug in their room and the sitting area.  I tried to vacuum it up, but it wouldn't.  Seriously, it wouldn't.  In fact, that just blew the sparkles around the room.   And from there, as I already said, they have some sort of mobility method and they could not be swept or vacuumed up.  And for all I knew, they multiplied too!  They each split in two and then each of those 80 million split again.  I feel like this is the sequel to the movie GREMLINS.  The little sparkles are going to grow and multiply and eventually push us out of apartment and from there, who knows.  A national calamity.  Call out the National Guard.      

Don't bother doing the math to figure out how many we have because  at this point the sparkles have kind of taken over  some of our apartment.  In one room it looks like this:


 In other places in the apartment you can just see a couple pieces of something shiny on the floor.  And that would be the sparkles.  Like I said, they are everywhere.  So when I wash my face in the evening.. they are there.  Luckily they haven't taken over our kitchen living room area yet, so we mostly stay in that area, but we have had to combine our bedrooms as the above picture is the original room where the sparkles were first "given water after midnight" and were dropped all over and expanded.

I will be contacting the Barbie R people this next week to ask them how to delouse, deglitter the apartment and I will post their answer, though they may not answer right away, as I don't think it is a "FAQ" yet.  But to be fair, ever since lead soldiers were scrapped as toys for kids (my Father had a collection of them when he was a kid and he kept them in our basement in a locked up metal suitcase for as long as we lived in that house) toy companies have been quick to recall dangerous toys or make changes to toys when it was found they could be a choking hazard, or at least to print on the box a warning that this toy is for above three year olds because it could be a choking hazard to three and below.  So I am confident that the good manufacturers of Barbie R will help me get out of my predicament.  Whether they answer in time will be another question.  at this point, I need a quick answer.   Wish me luck.   However, I would like to warn all readers that in my "limited" opinion, sparkles for Barbie R are in fact, NOT a good idea.  

Here is the update of our 1000 piece puzzle Santa got my 4 year old for Christmas.  Both she and I have been working on it before pre school in the morning and a bit before bedtime.  She works on it herself in the late afternoon before I get home from work.