Monday, January 14, 2008

How not to curl your hair

It was Saturday night. All of my girls took their shower or bath to get ready for church the next day. As each was done, they came down to where I was reading and I brushed their hair for them. It's one of those things that they usually just don't take the time to do well. I made sure that each of them had smooth, tangle free hair.

Just about the time that the oldest should have been coming down for a kiss good night, I heard her come down the stairs. "Help!" "What did you do?" "I tried curling my hair with my comb." Oh my! I have no idea how many times she twisted her hair around her comb, but it was firmly attached. I knew what my wife would do. She'd just cut it off, and take her to the hair dresser on Monday to get it "fixed", which would probably result in shoulder length hair.

I approached it as more of a puzzle. I slowly tried to unwind a little bit of hair. Having a tough time with the fine tooth comb, I pulled out a toothpick to be able to guide a few strands at a time. My girls think I use toothpicks for everything. I'm sure one of these years I'll get a box for my birthday. I'm not like either of my grandfathers who often had toothpicks in their mouths. But I do use them to mix epoxy for gluing back together Polly Pockets or to shim wheels for pinewood derby cars or for filling in holes to redrill later for a screw or placing down Perler beads or ... Ok, enough.

The toothpick helped, but the hair was not budging. I tried soaking the hair with detangler spray. Still no luck. Everynow and then I'd be able to get enough undone to unwrap it once, but the gap between what was twisted on her head and the comb was shrinking and the comb was long enough that I couldn't get the hair around the end anymore. I was just getting to the point where my wife would have started (ie. cutting it off) when inspiration struck. I tried to break the teeth off the comb to ease the detangling operation. Darn unbreakable combs. By this time my wife had come down to see how I had progressed. She knew I had much more patience for these things.

Since my wife was there I asked her to go fetch the wire cutters I got her for Christmas (yes, that's two times I bought her tools as gifts in 2007). I started systematically pruning the comb, unwinding the hair and pushing it over to allow another cut to further make the comb smaller. Once the comb was completely destroyed and removed from her hair, it didn't take long to slowly work out the tangles (especially since it was already saturated with detangler spray).

My daughter learned an important lesson, hopefully her sisters will learn from her, and I learned that a toothpick is not the be-all-to-end-all tool my daughters would have me think it is.

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