Hair care and cornrows

I still think it's humorous that God chose me, of all people, to be the one responsible to do Adelia's hair.

The reason that's funny is that I am a very low-maintenance kind of a girl when it comes to my own hair.

This is what I do each day: I wash and condition my hair, comb it out, and then I pull it back into a pony-tail (*except* on Sundays when I leave it down, but even then I keep a hair elastic around my wrist in case it annoys me) and that's the extent of my hair care. Pretty simple.

I don't use a hair dryer, a curling iron, or any sort of product one would put in their hair, other than whatever shampoo/conditioner is on sale at the time. Heck, I rarely even use a mirror.

Black hair elastics are my sole hair accessory.

Adelia, on the other hand, at just three years of age, has several hair products [most of which I have to order away for, mind you] and enough accessories (elastics, barrettes, snaps, beads, and combs) to fill up a room of our house. OH MY GOODNESS, readers: You have NO idea. I had no idea.



Any and all hair inspiration I receive is from one of these two sites:

Happy Girl Hair

Keep Me Curly

I am so thankful for these mothers who have spent so much time reviewing hair products, posting tutorials and pictures of the various styles they've done on their own girls so that less-experienced mothers (like me!) can learn from them.

Oh, and here is my favorite place to purchase all sorts of cute beads and snaps:

Snapaholics

I wish I took more pictures of Adelia's hair, if only to use as a resource for me when I need to figure out what to do with her hair next. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to take a picture of this girl, because she never.stops.moving! This is the best I could do today:

{front: This is the first time I've done a side part! I like it.
There are 3 cornrows in the front with the heart snaps and everything else is braids & beads}

{back}

Have I mentioned how much Adelia loves braids and beads? She loves the sound her beads make when they click together, and the only thing she ever requests when it's hair time is beads!

This is only the third time I've done cornrows. The first two tries had me in tears, literally. Then I gave up and only recently tried them again. I couldn't figure out how to braid "under" rather than over, as I always have done. I watched all sorts of instructional videos and I could see how they were doing it, but when I got behind Adelia with her hair and my own fingers, I simply couldn't do it.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of it, though. Here's my trick: The only way I was finally able to figure it out was to talk myself through it as I did it. I whisper instructions to myself as I go along (something like "right under...left under... center" (and when I say "center" I know to pull the new hair up to join the center section). Then I repeat.

My assessment, for what it's worth: Cornrows are much quicker than braids simply because you can pull more hair into a cornrow than a single braid, so her hair can get done much faster when there are cornrows in the style somewhere. And that's a very good thing when it takes hours to do her whole head. :)