When too healthy is a bad thing

I really, really love my daughter. I would die for her. I would gladly step in front of a bullet, or a speeding car, or a zombie in order to save her. This is what I told myself over and over again tonight as I tried for 90 minutes to tie straws in her hair. You may be wondering why I was tying straws in her hair. I blame Disney, Pixar specifically, and Utah women with too much time on their hands.

You see, it all started when we took Child 3 to see Brave last summer which we both just loved. It is a great movie about mother/daughter relationships and about the only Disney movie ever where the child has two loving parents. So it is my fault in that I encouraged her love of this movie. Here is the problem. Merida has beautiful red wildly curly hair. Child 3 has Rapunzel hair. Remember when she grew it out last year to be Rapunzel and then got lice? Yeah, me too. That was not an awesome week. But her hair is still very long and very blonde and very straight. She has Barbie straight hair. She has hair that people pay lots of money and lots of time using styling products to get. It looks like this.

But she wants it to look like this.

I happen to like Merida's hair a lot and think it is more fun. It is much more like Child 1 and Child 2 who both have red curly hair. So when Child 3 discovered a YouTube channel made by a Mom in Utah who is a professional hair dresser who told her she could have Merida hair in 30 minutes, she showed me the video which claims it only takes 30 minutes to tie about 20 straws in her hair to make it go from straight to curly. Ha! It might take a professional hairdresser 30 minutes to tie 20 straws in her daughter's hair, but it took me 90 and I lost count after around 40 straws. Child 3 has a lot of hair.

This woman, who I am rapidly learning to dislike spends a LOT of time filming how to make very complicated arrangements with her daughters' hair. You know those really complicated hairstyles they would wear on Star Trek like this one? 

Well, this woman would say it's a great hairstyle for the first day of school and it will only take you 30 minutes! And Child 3 would believe her and ask me to do it for her.

The straws were extremely slippery, and so is Child 3's hair. There was a lot of yelling--all of it from me at the stupid straws. But I suppose I was only in labor with Child 3 for 6 hours, so this will make up for that being so short. Child 3 got the brilliant idea to use hair spray to make the straws and her hair stickier, so that made the last ones much easier. I really hope they work. Because I love her and I want her to be happy about her hair. We'll see. You see, the thing about beautiful straight hair that people who don't have it don't know is that it is completely unmanageable. Oh, it looks like it is so easy to deal with, and it is if you don't mind it only doing one thing which lie their flat against your head completely straight. If you try to braid it, it slips out. If you put it in a pony tail, eventually the elastic will slip out and fall on the floor and get stepped on. And forget about buns or chignons. Those won't stay in without a mountain of bobby pins and several cans of hair spray. So we make do with leaving it down and straight and people say, oh you have such beautiful shiny hair! And we say thank you and secretly curse it and wish that it would. just. do. something! For once in our life! Child 3 is going to keep trying. And I'll keep helping her because A. I know how it feels and B. I feel guilty because she got the straight hair from me. So really it's my fault. And Disney's.

You know what is better than a brownie? The look on Child 3's face if this whole thing works. I'll let you know if it does.