But We Just Did Your Hair!

You know that amazing sense of satisfaction when you finish a marathon styling session? Isn't it great?

I'm sure many of you also know that not-so-amazing feeling when you find out that your child is about to do something that could completely destroy the style that took hours to do, right? I just got to experience that feeling last week.

I spent 9 hours putting Syd's hair into the mini twist style she's currently wearing. Then, less than a week later, I heard the words "We're having a paint war at youth group!"

Yep, you read that right. A paint war. Followed by a water fight. My first thought was "That sounds like fun!" That was immediately followed by my second thought, which was "But we just did your hair!" Sigh.

Now, I would never make her miss out on a fun experience like that because of her hair, but for a minute there I was really wishing I could just tell her not to go. I mean, how on earth would we scrub paint out of her head full of twists without causing the frizz of the century? Those 200+ twists could very easily become casualties of the impending paint war.

But, as you may have expected, we did find a way for her to participate without destroying her twists. It worked like a charm and it was super easy. I'm sure most people would come up with something similar, but I wanted to show you what I did in case you find yourself in a similar situation (although I'm not sure paint wars are actually all that common...lol).

First, I used my fingers to part her twists down the center of her head and put her hair into 2 cornrows.

Then I wrapped the braids around her head and pinned them up on the sides.

Now her hair fit nicely up into a shower cap.

But the shower cap didn't fit very snugly. We were afraid it may not stay on all the way and some of her hair could still get covered in paint. A quick trip to the dollar store found our solution.

That shower cap wasn't going anywhere now! At first, Syd was a little self-conscious to look like this during the paint war. I mean, there were dozens of kids there, and she didn't want to be the only one wearing something on her head. To make her feel better, I picked up a few extra shower caps while we were at the dollar store. Her plan was to ask some friends to wear them with her so she wasn't the only one, but that's not exactly how things went. People ended up asking HER if they could have one to keep their hair protected! Syd was more than happy to pass them out.

And of course, she only wore the shower cap for the paint part of the evening. She removed the two layers of protection and unpinned her hair before the water fight.

I think it's safe to say we made a wise choice keeping her hair protected. Here's the "after" shot of her cap.

And at the end of the night, I had one very colorful, very wet tween (who still had paint-free hair).

The moral of this story is this: 

There have been many times I've heard about people limiting their children's activities because they don't want to destroy a hairstyle. But at the end of the day, it's only hair. There's usually a simple way to keep hair protected. There's just nothing that compares to watching children enjoy a crazy, messy childhood!