Brave Hair

A break from our sporatically scheduled Costa Rica recap posts to bring you: Brave Hair.

So here's the story. Wait, no. Let's back up. First, Bug's hair. She was born bald and stayed that way for a long time, but it must have been because she was getting those follicles all geared up for some real crowd-pleasing tresses. I am not exaggerating when I say that when we are out in public someone (usually an old lady) comments on Bug's hair probably, oh, 65-70% of the time. Sometimes I worry that Baggins, with his ashy nothing-fancy blondish-brown locks, is going to get a complex about the whole thing.

NOW the story. Yesterday, Bug put diaper cream in her hair. The parents out there will simply shake their heads in sympathy without trying to assign reason to the whole event, but for those of you who don't have experience with this sort of nonsense, I asked her why she'd do such a thing.

 "So it doesn't get all bunchy."

Sure. Obviously.

So anyway, bath time went from optional to must-do, which was ok because as you can tell from the pictures above, girl wasn't exactly a shining beacon of hygiene even before she slimed A&D ointment in her hair.

After bath time, I gave Bug two choices. We could brush and blow dry her hair out like usual, or she could sit very still and let me put in lots of braids so we could try to give her Brave Hair.

We're backing up again for a minute. Bug is in a real princess phase right now, and as you might imagine, she feels a special kinship with the two red-headed princesses out there. While she hasn't even seen The Little Mermaid, she adores Ariel, but let's face it. With her 1,500 individually sculpted curls, Merida from Pixar's Brave is the reigning queen of little red-headed girls the world over.

Anyway, the promise of avoiding the dreaded blowdryer made the decision a no-brainer. Also, I might have bribed her by letting her watch cartoons and eat a pack of Smarties while I braided.

Bug's hair is, for the most part, very fine and straight like mine. I french braid the front of Bug's hair fairly regularly to keep the wispy parts out of her face, and we've noticed that (unlike mine) her hair does tend to stay sort of crimped after we unwind the braid. A challenge was born.

The color dimension in Bug's hair is pretty unbelievable. In fact, a family friend recently asked if I color her hair to make it look like that. (Oh yeah. That's what I'm going to spend chunks of my hard-earned paycheck on. Coloring a three year old's hair.) Anyway, in the picture above, you can see some of the stark contrasts that girl boasts without even trying. Down the center of the braid is hair from the crown of her head, where it is the very reddest. Further down the back of her head, though, is a section of golden blonde strands that are barely warm-hued at all. It's pretty amazing, and I've been staring at it since it grew in.

After a good night's sleep, we unwound the braids to see if we were successful.

Sometimes when I look at her, really LOOK at her, the breath catches hard in my throat and I find myself rooted to the ground.

She is so beautiful.