Poisonous Seeds and Lice

This morning we dropped Vivian off at school as usual. On the way back Evan said something from the back seat which caused Jo to turn and look. He had carefully chewed some seedpods and the remains were in his mouth. Vivian had picked the seedpods of a Pride of Barbados from the garden the other day and a few had ended up in the car. I vaguely recalled that they may be poisonous. While I drove Jo looked them up on my phone. One version said that the immature raw seedpods were poisonous but not toxic. Another website stated that the seeds used to be ground up and fed to criminals to kill them. So we drove on to Evan's doctor's office.

They looked him over and checked him out and contacted poison control and decided that he would live. They didn't need to pump his stomach or anything drastic. The consensus was that he hadn't ingested enough to cause a problem. We drove back home relieved and Evan put on his pirate hat and jumped in to his boat (beanbag) and screamed "Aaaaarrgh matey!!".

Later - around lunch time Jo got a call from Vivian's teacher. She thought Vivian had lice and she needed to be picked up immediately. There is a lice scare going through the schools in Austin and her teacher had informed the parents that she was going to be doing inspections every day. Turns out she spotted a couple of left-over dormant eggs from Vivian's Indian lice infestation from last year. So Jo has taken Vivian to a lice treatment place to rid her of those eggs or to certify her lice free. She got to watch an iPad movie (see iPad holder below), drink chocolate milk, eat animal crackers, and generally have a salon afternoon.

Quite a day. And it's only 2:15 in the afternoon.