Hair-tastic

As you have heard, working with the kids hair has not been so easy for me. Well, Vaughn isn't so hard. I taught him to brush it each day with a special brush and now all is well. Pop gave him a haircut the other day and now he looks like this:

I know. It's awesome. He laughed for joy when he saw it and said, "I look like a soccer player!"

Eloise...not so much. As her hair has grown, I have sought the expert opinions of my fellow adoptive parents, the internet and my African friends. The one thing I have learned is that there is no easy way to do this and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Lucky me. Turns out that African hair is the same as caucasian hair in that someone with long, naturally curly hair doesn't treat their hair the same as someone with short thin hair.

I had a stroke of luck a few weeks ago when we went to see one of my friends, she just started braiding Eloise's hair and an hour or so later, we had this:

Lasted about a week, then I had to scour the internet for how to (painlessly?) remove the braids. That turned out fine, except we were back to her homeless black man on a city bus look.

At the baseball game on Friday, I begged her to keep her hat on, telling her it was too hot at the game for her head to be exposed and thinking the whole time about how the only thing that would be exposed was my gross inadequacy and laziness. Seriously, I am embarrassed to even post this photo and fear one of you will call child protective services on me.

In the morning when we do her hair, it actually looks good, but as each minute progresses curls unravel, dryness sets in and we have a child who although incredibly beautiful looks like we just found her in a dumpster. Here is what she looks like when the day starts (that is, when I have the energy to work through her tears and protests, get it wet, condition it, comb it a little and put in some curl enhancer.)

If you have any tips, go ahead and post them in the comment section below. If you can come up with the winning formula for this lovely child's hair, you win free lunch and an hour of babysitting. And what I mean by that is that you get to babysit for an hour and cook rice and beans for the kids.