I’ve always been pretty bad at doing hair. My own, someone else’s, doesn’t matter. No creativity, no skill. And, really, it has barely mattered. As someone who has had long, straight hair her entire life, I never needed to do much. Wash it, brush it. Throw it in a ponytail. Eventually I mastered the double french braid, but that was more utilitarian than cute.
Well, now I’ve got a little girl. A girl whose hair grew straight in front of her face.
And who thought barrettes, rubberbands, and the like were the tools of the devil, trying to steal her soul.
Eventually, she grew to accept the presence of the barrette. No idea why, just one day she got distracted and stopped screaming about it.
In fact, she started insisting on two barrettes. Every day. That she had to pick out BY SELF. That never, ever matched each other. Or what she was wearing.
I can’t imagine what possessed me to try to put pigtails in her hair, but I did it. Whenever I could distract her, I did it. Because it’s stinking cute.
And yet, all the time I had put into parting her hair to the side every night after bath, in the hopes that it wouldn’t fall in her face, meant that I now had to fight the part every time I tried to do pigtails. So we mostly stuck with the barrettes, which were alright, but annoying and always slipped out. Still a mess.
I even attempted a single ponytail, once. Kind of cute, but didn’t stay in.
I don’t know what took me so long to hit on the two half-ponytails. Duh! Keeps the hair out of the face, doesn’t fight the part. Genius! Trouble was, she still really preferred the barrettes, so I kind of had to distract her to let me do the ponytails.
Then, I realized something. She had become completely enamored of the barrettes themselves. She loved the accessory. She didn’t want ponytails, because she loved the barrettes. Duh, mommy! Ponytails AND barrettes!
And so, now that is our routine every morning. She demands ponytails AND barrettes, each of which she has to meticulously inspect and choose from the basket of hair accessories. And every morning, I have to practice my ponytail technique. I’ll figure this stuff out yet.
