Ladies and Gentlemen...We Have A Ponytail!

I always dreamed of having a little girl.  When I volunteered at a daycare in my teens I would sit and braid the hair of all the little girls.  Long flowing locks and the moms LOVED it...until the little girls didn't want to wash their hair that night.  I worked so hard to learn braiding from my best friend's mom because we will just say my mom was a bit hair "doing" challenged.  She could do the basics but never a french braid.  That was what I wanted so bad and my friend always had the prettiest braids.  So, when I learned I was having my own doll little girl I was so excited to have my very own head of hair to braid.  Out came Olivia and she had a head of hair.  WOOHOO!  

Although braiding was a ways off I could just imagine it!  I have thick long hair and I just knew she would too.  Well, that is until she turned up with this cute little round face that was screaming for a "bob".

Oh how we were committed to this "do".  We re-wet it each morning and would blow dry it and curl it under...until she was fully aware of princesses.  Yes, there is not a princess that Disney has created that has short hair.  So, we she decides that her hair just must be like a princess.  I give her the talk about how we will have to take care of her hair etc.....basically I was talking to the wall, of course.  She was 4....

Pretty good start uh?  This is was the look when she decided and low and behold just two short months later she decided to giver herself a one-sided trim and off came hair from the left side her head.  No, I did not leave the scissors in plain view.  She found them, held out the left side with her left hand and CUT!  Where was I?  How did I let this happen?  It was just two weeks before Christmas.  Um, well I was cooking dinner, tending to my three month old baby...who knows...but I was clearly nowhere around when she forgot that a princess has long hair.  Well, what do I do when I notice that she is missing a chunk of hair at bath time?  I freak out...of course.  Not one of my prouder moments...and I actually think I asked her how she could do this to me?  Oops.  She had this blank stare on her face as I kept asking begging her to tell me why and where was the hair.  Because even in my most crazed moment this was a first, and definitely a last, and I was saving that hair!  It took forever for her to finally tell me it was hidden behind the tv.  Yes, there it is was....inches of gorgeous brown hair and a pair of scissors tucked behind the tv.  How was I going to hide this.  Well, out comes the curling iron and it worked pretty well.  All curled up you could barely notice...not me though..I stared at it ALL the time.  I was mortified.

Pretty good, right?  Except now we were back to "doing" hair every morning.

Could it really get any worse?  Yes.  Shortly after returning from our holiday trip home to North Carolina our family photographer needed a child to "shoot" for the cover of a local magazine, "could she use Olivia"?  Um, yes.  Imagine the panic...I now HAD to have this fixed.  Off we go and that hair dresser fixed it the best she could without cutting it back into a "bob".  It had to do, we made it work and the picture was taken.

As her hair grew we definitely had to get creative with how to fix it because we had this entire section of short hair on the left side.  Ponytails were our answer for a long time.  Then cute little buns on the sides of her head.  LOVED those!  Not her favorite...but see how cute they were?

Well, my friends, although her hair would technically go into a ponytail a couple of months ago I would not let her wear it that way "out" until it would stay back completely without the left side still slipping out.  Yes, I am anal that way.  So, last week it happened.  I realized that it had been staying back while around the house, so I surprised her one morning while doing hair for school that she could finally have a ponytail for school!  You would have thought I told her we were going to Disney to show the princesses herself.  So one full year after the big cut....

Agh!  I love it...love the smile and so glad she loves it!  

Now..on to perfecting those french braids....