Sugar, Spice, and...

My daughter has more hair than any other two year old in the world. Well, maybe not, but some days it seems like it. Her hair is as long as mine was when I was sixteen, and that doesn’t count the added length for it being ⅔ curls at the bottom. I’ve had people ask if I curl her hair for her, and so far I’ve avoided answering sarcastically, “yes, I make my two year old sit still for twenty minutes so I can hold a hot iron near her head.” Instead, I usually say no and explain that her father has curly hair. I’ve always had a bit of a wave in my hair, so my daughter got the best of both of her parents: it’s not too curly, and it’s not too flat. With her cute nose and rosy cheeks, she looks like she’s come straight from the shelf at a toy store.

I used to joke while I was pregnant with my second child that she had better be born with long raven locks, because of all the heartburn I was having. I couldn’t drink a glass of milk without my esophagus going up in flames. I was rewarded with a beautiful girl with tiny head full of hair. She has twice as much hair now as her sister did when she was this age. If it grows at the same rate, she’ll be a brunette Rapunzel by the time she’s two. Now, though, her hair looks like Matt Smith’s in his first episode as The Doctor, no matter how much I brush it.

My dad is always pushing her hair off of her forehead as he says to me, “when she gets older she’s going to ask you why you never combed her hair.” But I do, it just sticks up adorably in every direction whether or not I try to tame it, so I usually don’t. Although, if I make extra effort with it, you can usually tell that all it’s really trying to do is to curl just like her big sister’s hair, but it’s not yet long enough to get the job done.I realize that not everyone’s daughters have the same amount of hair as mine do, but sometimes I feel that the old rhyme got it completely wrong: “sugar and spice, and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” or at least left out the necessary part about “and hair. Lots of hair.”