A how-to guide on getting glass shards out of a two-year-old’s hair

So I am in RS conducting the meeting when they nursery teachers bring in my Sunny Bunny. Obviously there was some trouble. I assumed it was a dirty diaper or a runny nose or worst-case…barf. But I was wrong. Barf was not worst case.

Worst case is actually when the window in the nursery room randomly falls out of the frame and breaks over the top of the nursery leaders head and showers the nursery kids with glass and your sweet sweet daughter is covered with thousands of tiny glass shards.

I had no idea what to do. It looked like someone had thrown a hand-full of rock salt in her hair. I started by taking her outside and carefully sliding her piggies and bows out of her hair, turning her upside down and gently shaking her. It was somewhat effective, but still left her head sparkling in the sunlight with all the microscopic glass pieces in her hair.

Another mom was outside with me picking glass out of her son’s hair and she mentioned she was thinking of taking him home and vacuuming his head. Then I noted there were vacuums inside and we both went in to vacuum our kid’s heads.
It was much more effective than the shaking we had done before. Sunny was a real trooper and didn’t cry much. She just kept looking at me and saying…“ I must be clean huh mom?”

After three vacuum sessions the only glass left were the microscopic pieces that were stuck to her scalp from natural oils and sweat. I was so freaked out about how I was going to get those out without giving her 10,000 tiny glass sliver cuts that I started to cry.

They also told me some of the kids had glass inside their clothes, so I removed them right there in the hall. Stripped her buck naked. Poor girl.

Steve found me at this point and we took her home and called the ER to see if they had any recommendations. They told us to ever so gently shampoo her hair and comb it out while it was soapy. So we laid her on the kitchen counter hanging her head over the sink and started shampooing and combing. She screamed through the whole thing saying again…“I must be clean momma!”

We blew her hair dry and took her back outside to see if the sunlight would still reflect glass pieces in her hair. It didn’t.

And that my friends is how to get glass shards out of your child’s hair. Shake, vacuum, shampoo.