BAD HAIR DAY

 I have a lot of good qualities.  I developed most of these qualities, however, to mask some of my bad qualities.  For instance, I can clean my house at warp speed. I clean faster than anyone I know.  Why, you ask?  I have to because I usually have left my work 'til the last moment and I am under the gun.  So it is with doing hair.  I can braid hair beautifully.  I can do a tight perfect braid in no time.  Why, you ask?  Because I am usually covering something up, and I have found that braids are good for that. 

My husband has four beautiful sisters.  Since I grew up living close to the Heaton's, I watched these girls grow up and marveled how every week in church, they were always perfectly dressed with flawless hair.  I suppose that even then, somewhere in the back of my mind I aspired to be the kind of Mom who could pull that off.  For those of you wondering if God has a sense of humor, I ended up marrying their brother and having all girls.  It's just not fair to any of the involved parties.

When Mary was a baby I was pretty good with the whole hair thing.  Then her hair grew out and I was charged with getting a brush through it daily.  I watched my mother-in-law to see how she did it.  She would get the kids right out of the tub and with lightning fast hands, she would have their hair brushed out, dried and up in  ribbon.  Ya, I tried it.  I found that the more I worked on their hair the worse it looked.  If Alice styled their hair, it looked great for the entire day, if I did the EXACT same thing, they would look like they had just gotten out of bed in under an hour.  How could this be?  As I had more children, it got worse and worse.  It was somewhere between Alex and Emily that I fully embraced being a hands-off-mom and gave up entirely.  I have stumbled along through the years and as the kids got into school I discovered that if I couldn't brush through their hair, I could do a really tight braid and no one would be the wiser.  I can even braid evenly amid screaming and thrashing and all manor of wiggles.  I also discovered that a strategically placed braid would mask the occasional blob of shampoo that I would notice just as the kids were walking out the door.  Needless to say, on most days if you run into my kids, they will have a ponytail or a braid. 

So, this morning I got Emily out of the shower and helped to get her ready.  I decided to do her her hair today.  We get it all styled and Alex walks in with a horrified and confused look on her face and says,
"What are you doing?"
I was just about to answer when Emily piped up. 
"It's picture day.  You know, the day when mom brushes our hair out."
"It's not picture day!" Alex said in fear.  "You aren't going to brush my hair are you?"
Well, I wasn't before that lame a$$ series of comments, but just to make her suffer, I brushed carded out every inch of her hair.  Behold, there was much weeping and wailing.


                                                           

This was so much fun, I may do it again next month:)