this woman’s work

Madison and I spent some times yesterday watching youtube videos about doing hair. Someone in the local IFIF group forwarded this channel to our email list and I was watching it the other day because Madison wanted to learn how to put beads in her hair. She saw a guy with black beads and braids at the grocery and then we saw two little girls at the park and another little girl at a restaurant so Madison was inspired for me to try it.

Madison’s hair is tricky. It has a lot of different textures throughout (it’s getting very kinky just at her forehead and no place else) and she is prone to play hair salon, which means she dismantles her braids or pony tails and brushes it hard. I’ll sit down and get her hair done for the day after breakfast, go downstairs to work and by the time I come up for lunch she’s taken it down and brushed it to a wide frizz around her head. Most days she ends up with a simple scraped back ponytail. I’m not crazy about the ponytail look. Yes, she looks adorable but to me it also looks lazy. Still I’m not going to stop her from wanting to mess with her own hair and we keep ponytail holders in the car now since she often does it while we’re driving and she’s bored.

My goal is to just get her dang hair out of her eyes and the more braiding I can do towards the front of her head, the more the style will hold since the front is so kinky and also so much shorter (it’s all her new post-baby growth coming in). That’s why her ponytails always end up looking sloppy. I could slap a bunch of product on her hair to keep it down but I’m not so hep to the product — even natural product — since it would mean more hairwashing for her, an activity she despises. I like to stick to once a week hairwashing and so we live with the frizzies. (I do use some loc butter to keep her braids tight but otherwise it’s just leave-in conditioner.)

Anyway, our favorite youtube video was this one:

So after watching that we were both inspired even though Madison’s hair wouldn’t hold most of those styles. Still, we got an A for effort and this is what we did with her hair yesterday:

I know — it’s kinda sloppy. It’s hard for me to do tight braids because 1) I’m not the small motor skill girl in the family (that would be Erica) and 2) her hair is really slippery and 3) she’s a pretty wriggly person even when she’s trying very very hard to stay still. It took an hour but it’s holding today (most of her hair styles don’t hold for very long before the braids start coming undone) so it was worth it. Likely if I could do smaller braids it would last longer but I’m not that skilled and she’s not that patient. (Watching the “how to” videos fascinated her in part because the other little girls sit so still but her body just won’t let her.) You can see that if her hair is combed or brushed, it gets pretty straight in the back.

This is another style we did the other day, which she loved but took apart just a couple of hours later. (sigh):

This was my first time trying piggyback braids but I should have done it lower towards the front of her head. The back I left unbraided, which I usually do with all of her styles because Madison likes to feel it on the back of her neck. Come summer we’ll probably rethink that.

Next post some pictures of Madison where you can see her face. (As always, write me if you want the password!)