Hair:
Today [January 26] I took a photo of the Back of Victoria to document her hair length. Then I had Frank take one of me just the same.
Victoria has very smooth straight hair. (I’ve taught her to comb it every day, but she doesn’t, so when I notice, as today wanting to photograph it, that she hasn’t combed it in at least two days it’s full of little knots. So I used a teeny bit of oil to help untangle things and whoa the burnished highlights that showed up!)
She has some strands of red in that dark blond, I’ve seen them now and then, buried in the depths of her hair, whole strands, several grouped together, lovely copper/auburn red. The flash of the photo really showed up something the eye doesn’t see as well, but it’s there. My own head was blond when I was a child and when my hair began to darken in photos I was still a blonde to the eye, but the photo didn’t totally lie, as my own picture shows my color today, as it’s been since sometime in my teens, it’s photogenic and coming, just not as detectable to the eye at the time, and time does so forth the truth. 
Victoria gets a hair wash once a week (sometimes not, but that’s not what we desire), and a conitioning that is rinsed out right away. I use California Babies Shampoo/Body Wash and my own WholeFoods brand Conditioner on her. –But I must rinse it out very well, or her hair is very heavy, dull, and disgusting.
We have been growing her hair out since the day she was born, and had many setbacks with her hair staying so baby fine for so long, then when it came in thicker –three separate “cutting” accidents via her and her brothers using illicit scissors applications in secret … well, it’s only been since the last year or so that it’s been getting really longer.
[I can't put an exact date on it from memory. Maybe I wrote about it in a post here. I'll have to look for that and repost the pertinent info HERE if so.]
My hair, I trim off scraggly ends piece by piece as need be. Since it’s “curly” it’s ‘curl by curl’ mostly. The longest part of my hair is the scraggliest. When Asa was born [September 2000] I had my post pardum hair fall-out as I usually do after a birth, some months after it. So that would have been sometime in early 2001. Not long after that I noticed a lot of new growth all over [much different than the prior post pardum experiences], and most noticeable at the nape of my neck and at the front of my hairline. So that would be sometime in mid-2001. All that hair now is below my shoulders, I’m not sure how low, but lower than that. So the hair that is longest is fairly lonely, with it’s group buddies further up in the mass.
If I trimmed off the length right now I’d lose inches, but I wouldn’t lose “much hair”, if that makes sense. I’m happy to keep it uneven/scraggly for now. It’s curly so that doesn’t matter to me, I don’t do “blunt cuts” and “even straight cuts”. Curls need cut in their proper position as each curl matters individually. So crooked edges are not really noticeable, and scraggly ends are moreso but still just par for the course, there and not “ugly” per se.
The last “hair dresser” cut was while I was pregnant with #2. My hair got “less curly” during that time. So I guess that’s why I had it cut. But I grew it out after that again. It was only a cut to my shoulders, mostly. I had bangs then, and between then and pregancy #3 I decided to grow those bangs out (not much time between them, Nov. 1998 to before Sept. 2000). That “new growth” after Asa’s birth, I kept a fringe of it for bangs, I had no other bangs at that time, they were long gone grown out. So I did that for a few months, then said “Forget it, I’m gonna grow these frilly worthless hairs out too” [it was a frustratingly too small amount of hair to do much with seeing as it went every direction being curly and too free, not enough bulk to make ringlets.]
That hair is way below my chin now. The shortest of my hairs.
Sometime ago, time melds into itself, I can’t recall how long, it’s just been over a year at the least, I began washing via using only conditioner. I’m not faithful to the Curly Girl (the book that introduced me to the method) method doing it every day. I never washed my hair every day anyhow. Once a week being a homebody is enough, if not too much for me.
So I developed my way being that if I wash it, I’ll wear it down that day, then the next day I’ll wear it down and just put conditioner in it dry to my satisfaction. I may do that for another few days, or put it up, in a pony tail, or tie it into a self-knot. The longer I go like that then, the more it flattens out. Really it’s nicest the day it’s washed, but it takes so long to dry with moisturizers/gel in it that it’s rather a whole day affair before it’s totally dry and then the day is practically over.
My hair isn’t really thick, but it’s light to medium density hairs and a lot of them that make a decent bulk, but that beef up with moisture to look way bigger than they really are. It’s wooly hair. That’s why the “conditioner only” method works so well with me.
I don’t have the spring of alot of inches that Curly Girl talks about that hair should have to classify its curl. But I have all the other descriptives for curly hair of the R type, ack, the name continuously escapes me. I must get my Curly Girl out one of these days.
I guess that if I took even better care of it my hair would improve. And once my hair is longer and some of the bottom stuff cut off it’ll show more improvement as well. Besides that, the hair on top is the heavy canopy type and it holds my under curls down. I need to get the right clips to dry my hair with to keep it upright on top, instead of heavy downness bringing. [This goes to that R type, the name I can't recall.]
My hair is very thirsty. My hair defies classification. So does all my coloring. Seasons, you know those? My eyes are dark green. My skin is fair, my hair is brown/red. I’m an Autumn, right? WRONG! I’m not. I call myself a Summer, and others have agreed with me about it, but that my eyes and hair defy that class. Blues and denim blue’s and blue-reds are my favorites. I can wear Autumn Colors, but I feel ugly in them. I look like my hair in them. Not like ME. They pull me away from me and hide me under an ugly film of orangy-ick. But I can get away with some of those colors if they aren’t near my face, so diluting them I can wear them. I wear all Summer colors fine. I wear some Winter colors well, but not all of them.
So I’m a mixed up thing. That’s according to the Color Me Beautiful and the Shaklee color system back in the 1980′s.
So then, my hair isn’t corkscrew tight, but is nearly as thirsty as that, maybe not AS much as corkscrew, but I put conditioner and oils straight on my hair and it drinks it up.
I need to get on a roll and keep doing it and do it and do it and get it going well.
Victoria – January 26, 2005
A tad oily from Olive Oil spot used to help untangle some nasties before photo.
Maisy – January 26, 2005
Washed day before, so a bit drier than should have been, taken outside and breeze blowing sides out a bit as well. Of course it looks less curly since I’d slept on it overnight as well.
