hair

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have allowed my youngest daughter to satisfy her hair fancy by playing in my hair.

If you need some background, click here or here.

But last week she wanted to try something new. She wanted to braid my hair. Like this:

These are the braids that my girls are currently wearing. And in a weak moment on night last week, my hair ended up looking like this:

They braided my hair and added extra hair. The night before Tyra’s birthday. So out of Mommy guilt, I agreed to wear my hair like that for the next two days.

And the last day, all I could do was this:

The braids weren’t very tight in the beginning…and then they started to unravel. And it looked crazy. It really did.

So Tita put it in a huge bun on the top of my head because that’s the style. But it unraveled. And unraveled. And unraveled some more.

And by Thursday, I looked like a clown. A nice clown, but a clown nonetheless.

See the photos…I dare you not smile…or laugh…or whatever you deem appropriate. Because that is NOT what my hair looks like now.

Keep smiling!

This week, I took mother/daughter bonding to a whole new level. I need you to indulge me here for a few moments and stay with me. Do you remember how you learned about beauty and hair? Magazines and girlfriends, right? And now, our kids have YouTube in addition to those things…but ummm, what if they need to practice?

My daughters are at the age where they are learning how to properly care for hair. And since we are all naturalistas, we are trying a lot of different products and regimes to learn. We share all kinds of hair ideas, apps, and advice. But what’s a mom like me to do when T2 asked if she could actually do my hair?

Let’s pause. She’s 10 years old. I love the way she brushes my hair, but she didn’t want to just brush it. Her exact words were, “can I flatiron your hair?” I had to breathe…was I really going to give that child a heat appliance and allow her to use it in my hair?

I talked to friends. I put it out there on Facebook. Cheryl even thought we could distract her by having a hair product fun night at her house where we girls all washed hair and tried different products on each other. And it worked.

For about 3 weeks. And she asked me again. And she looked really cute when she said it.

So I mentioned that in the summer, I wear my hair naturally curly and I reserve the flatironing for the fall. To which she replied, “Okay…let me work on your curls.” Sigh. So I did it. We worked on my curls for a couple of weeks. And here’s what we did:

I washed my hair and she braided it all over. I spent two days with it in the braids over the weekend and took it down. The curls were beautiful but I had a lot of shrinkage. That was week 1.

In week 2, she attempted to do a dry braid out.

Here she brushed my hair and then braided it dry. She felt that she needed more braiding practice before we told anyone about the style. Lol.

Which brought us to the day of the flatiron.

She didn’t burn me. And she was very careful about what she was doing. This was her favorite flatiron moment:

She told her siblings that special move gave my hair more body. “It’s a special trick that only certain stylists know,” she said.

So because it’s summer and there’s a thing called humidity, my hair was not straight very long. And she had to come up with a new style for hair-that’s-been-flatironed-but-doesn’t-look-like it. And she researched on YouTube some more. And she did it.

And guess what? You get to see it tomorrow when I post a VLOG with the results!