An Interesting Monster Needs an Interesting Hairdo

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No More Tears and No More Tangles–that’s what my mom used on me. And it’s what we used on Baguette, once her hair got long enough to tangle.

But it turns out that’s not enough any more. Baguette’s hair is what I like to call “frothy.” It’s very fine, and sleep whips it up into what could be a fashion-forward concoction that stars would pay good money for before heading out to the red carpet–except that it’s not a style, and it needs to be combed out.

Combing, however, hurt her. And the soft brush we started out with turned out to be too soft to do more than glide over the surface of her hair.

We bought a brush that I found via Babble.com (Update: It’s the Knot Genie.) that was purported to be easier on tangles, with less pulling. And it worked, but her hair was still dry.

So we added my leave-in conditioner to the regimen, combing it through after her bath. But while that might solve the problem immediately post-bath, it didn’t help at all the next morning.

Mind you, I don’t much care if Baguette has glossy locks. She’s three, and we’re not seeking fame and fortune via reality TV.

I do care, though, if her hair gets so dry and brittle that it’s in danger of breaking, which is where we found ourselves this winter.

I started using other products, notably my Very Expensive argan oil and macadamia nut oil. Which I now need to replace. And they helped, some, but not enough to keep up with winter dryness.

Add to this that Baguette’s hair comes in two distinct layers: corkscrew curls underneath, and straight on top. It’s the straight hair that’s fragile; the curls actually seem quite lush.

Bestie’s mom suggested Suave products for kids, which were working well in their house. They were definitely better than Johnson & Johnson, but her hair still seemed very breakable. We kept using that, and added rinse-out conditioner as a second step. Still breakable.

We ordered another detangling brush that we saw advertised on Sprout TV.

And then I came across a blog post that talked about the wonders of Hot Tot products. I wish I could remember which blogger wrote about it, because I would definitely link to that post and express my thanks.

Because these products are working.

Hot Tot brand shampoo and conditioner

We still need to add a little leave-in conditioner, but her hair seems much healthier since we started using Hot Tot shampoo and conditioner. And that infomercial detangling brush helps a lot, too.

The only catch? Hot Tot products are expensive–they cost much more than the shampoo and conditioner I use for myself. I’m talking dog shampoo expensive here.

But they work. So we’ll keep buying them. And while we know that Baguette isn’t ready for a full haircut yet (we have to trim her bangs when she’s asleep, to keep her from freaking out at the sight of scissors), we are considering taking her to the salon to get some advice about how to keep her hair strong and healthy.

Because an interesting monster needs an interesting hairdo. But no one needs split ends.

Farm Life

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Pierce College in Woodland Hills has an agricultural program, and one weekend every year, they open up their farm to the public. Luckily for us, this was that weekend. Much of my time was spent complying with cries of “PIGGYBACK!”, but I still managed to get a few shots.

Pierce College Farmwalk - chickens

Pierce College Farmwalk - sheep shearing

Pierce College Farmwalk - Toy Train

We also saw a cow and its calf, a tortoise, an owl, a parrot, goats and a kid, and horses, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Fresh Week, Fresh Start

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Well, last week was a bear, wasn’t it?

Over the weekend, Baguette and Mr. Sandwich went to swim class and our regular playdate with Bestie, while I went to my alumni club’s annual lunch, which raises money for scholarships. I haven’t been able to go for the past several years–it’s been too long a time to leave Baguette–but this year we made it work.

On Sunday, I took Baguette over to see Mr. Sandwich’s parents, who had been out of town, and he went for a bike ride–something he hasn’t been able to do in a couple of months. So it was a weekend full of doing things we would like to do more often, which is pretty cool.

Yesterday, our second CSA box arrived, full of fresh fruits and vegetables. What was in this week’s box from Good Life Organics?

fresh fruits and vegetables

Strawberries, potatoes, zucchini, oranges, apples, rosemary, an avocado, and chard

So last night, Baguette and I started out by snacking on some strawberries. Mr. Sandwich spiced up some chicken thighs and put them in the toaster/convection oven, and I cut up and boiled some potatoes. While the potatoes (and some garlic) cooked, I sliced up a zucchini and salted it. Then I sauteed it in coconut oil with more garlic (we love our garlic), adding lemon zest and lemon juice right at the end. I mashed the potatoes with the skins on and sprinkled the zucchini with parmesan. Presto, a fresh spring dinner!

Today, Baguette and I are taking more of the strawberries to eat during our respective days–me with my yogurt and granola for breakfast, and her with her macaroni and cheese (by the way, we’re trying some other brands in the hope of reducing food dyes) for lunch.

I’m trying to decide how to use the remaining zucchini–should I make a soup with my remaining meatballs and tortellini? Or should I slice it up for zucchini chips?

And if anyone has a great, easy recipe for chard, I’m all ears!

The Good That Men Do

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It’s easy, during a week like this, to be horrified, to be sad, to be scared. It’s natural.

But it’s also easy, if you take a look–as many people are doing–at the other end of terror and tragedy.

There’s Jaimie Muehlenhausen, of California, and common sense mixed with foresight.

There’s the group of Boston College students who said, “We will walk to show that we decide when our marathon ends.”

There’s Joe Andruzzi, Carlos Arredondo, the man with orange juice, the volunteer, the first responders, the woman who opened her doors, the volunteers who came back on Tuesday, the local businesses, the people who offered up their homes via Google Docs, the runners who kept running so they could donate blood.

Whether or not they’re entirely good, there’s Anonymous and their hacking of the Westboro Baptist Church Facebook page:

Westboro Baptist Church FB Hack

And there’s the very nature of Boston, as described by Dennis Lehane.

From a continent away, I had the same immediate reaction to Boston that I had to 9/11, and I described it on Facebook:

It’s indelicate, but nevertheless it is my first thought in these situations:

“F%@k those guys.”

I don’t know who they are, or what they want to accomplish, and it doesn’t matter. The very first reaction they get from me is anger.

Later on, when I think about it some more, I want to go home and hug my husband and daughter. But the first thing I do is get angry.

So bring on your terror. You may horrify me, but you don’t scare me.

They don’t scare Boston, either. Don’t let them scare you. Don’t let them limit you. Don’t fall for that.

They’re too small, and we’re too big.

There Is No Serial Killer in the Back Yard

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When I was in college, I injured my knee and spent six months in a knee immobilizer. This meant that when I was flying, I met every person in the airport. And also on the plane. I was constantly telling the story of How I Injured My Knee.

The result was that once I was off crutches, the last thing I wanted was to talk to people on planes. So I thought about how to avoid that.

I have always read a lot, so that’s my usual method of passing the time while in flight. I decided that what I needed was to select my books very carefully. If I read a bestseller, someone would want to know if I liked it, and whether I was going to see the movie, and what did I think of the casting. If I read one of the books for my classes, I’d probably have the great good luck of finding out I was sitting next to the author right after I said I thought it was boring.

It became clear that there was only one genre that would keep people from striking up conversations: true crime. Over the next couple of years, I read a lot of true crime. (By the way, that last one? Total BS, as is From Hell–both the graphic novel and the movie.)

My plan worked. No one wanted to talk to the girl reading about Jack the Ripper. And it wasn’t just coincidence–on one flight, a mildly creepy older guy sat down next to me, started to speak, looked at the title of the book on my lap, and stopped mid-sentence. He then talked to the man across the aisle for the rest of the flight. I call that a win.

Time passed. I stopped reading true crime because I got bored with it. But I did periodically watch movies about fictional killers. And Dennis Lehane’s Darkness, Take My Hand is a novel so scary and so well-written that I had to keep reminding myself that I didn’t actually believe in what he was describing.

Then a few things happened: I had two miscarriages, and Mr. Sandwich and I read Zodiac and watched the movie based on it. Both the book and the movie are very good. The Zodiac Killer was a really scary guy.

These things seem unrelated, but they weren’t. I developed mild depression after my second miscarriage, and suffered from insomnia. And since I was already distressed and exhausted, it didn’t take much for me to become unnerved by the Zodiac Killer.

“But,” you say, “That was decades ago.”

Of course, and that’s what the logical part of my mind told me (it also told me about how long the odds were). The other part, whatever you might call it, was scared. Not so scared that I wouldn’t go outside at night to hang up laundry–but scared enough to wonder, “What if?”

My brother, who knows that I enjoy thrillers and history, gave me a copy of The Truth of All Things by Kieran Shields. It involves a number of my interests, including detectives, mystery, and the Salem Witchcraft Trials.

But I’m choosing not to finish it. Because while I could get through the gruesome murder that takes place at the beginning of the book, later discoveries by the main characters made it clear that the killer was taking actions–and likely had a motivation–that I just couldn’t keep reading about.

Don’t get me wrong. I was enjoying the book. But I know what gets in my head, and what I don’t need to add. I didn’t need to see the posters for “The Strangers.” Or for any of the “Saw” movies.

There’s enough ugliness in the world. We can see that today in Boston. I don’t need to go looking for it.

The Farmer in the Dell

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Baguette’s day care has become a delivery point for a CSA program. For those of you not familiar with CSA programs, they’re basically a way to get food from local farmers without all that aggravating hassle of going to the farmers’ market.

(We actually live quite close to a very nice farmers’ market. I used to go every week. Then Baguette started eating produce in the grocery store, and I can’t inflict that on farmers.)

This farm delivers every other week and offers a few different options. I opted to get 1/2 of a “Family Box”, because it seemed like a good way to test the waters . . . er . . . produce. After all, I don’t want to find yet another way to pay for food that we don’t eat. There’s too much of that going around already.

This week was our first delivery. What did we get?

  • carrots
  • zucchini
  • kale
  • peas
  • lemon
  • oranges
  • tangerines
  • apples
  • avocados

All well and good, but what does that look like?

CSA box #1

I started off by eating an apple, because that’s easy. It takes no creativity or skill to eat an apple.

Then I upped my game a bit to have a kale smoothie. Kale, apple juice, fresh lemon juice, and honey, with a few ice cubes.

It was pretty tasty, but I don’t think my blender is optimized for kale. I’d drink (well, really, guzzle, because I’m able to eat dinner at exactly the point in the evening when Baguette insists on me holding her) some of it and then after a moment realize that I now had a mouthful of minced kale. Which needed to be chewed.

Mr. Sandwich checked out the box o’ food and said, “Let’s have carrots and peas tomorrow night. I’ll make fish, if that’s okay.”

I think that’ll be just fine.

Of Shoes, and Ships, and . . . No, Just Shoes

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Jill Pinnella Corso of Back Home Blog has a post that strikes a chord with me. It’s about shoes.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I wore a lot of heels. And by that, I mean that I wore heels as a grad student. I was really overdressed for a grad student.

I continued to wear heels, although thanks to the influence of Sex and the City, I gratefully stopped wearing nylons in my early 30s. Seriously, those things are a blight on humanity–they’re hot, they’re uncomfortable, they snag and rip and make you look sloppy with no warning at all. (Kate Middleton, I don’t care how much you love them. You are wrong.)

But the heels continued. When I was dating Mr. Sandwich, I had a collection of cute heels. I kept wearing them until after we were married. Then, one day, as I was walking to the corner, a neighbor in our building said, “I don’t see how you walk in those. They would make my feet hurt!”

That neighbor had some sort of magic powers, because Presto! Change-o! I could no longer wear those shoes. They made my feet hurt.

Then I got a new job, and I started commuting by bus. Which means that I stood a lot, and I discovered very quickly that I didn’t like standing on the bus in heels. It dramatically increased my odds of turning my ankle, and who enjoys that? Not me, anyhow.

For a while, I wore running shoes and brought a dressier option to change into at the office; I even bought a shoe rack so that I could leave shoes at the office rather than lugging them back and forth every day. But I often found that I would have to go straight into a meeting, without the opportunity to upgrade my footwear.

(Then I got pregnant and my shoe options continued to narrow–ironically–until my feet were so swollen that I could only wear Mr. Sandwich’s running shoes.)

When I came back to work, I decided that I needed commuter shoes–something that would be comfortable for the days I had to stand on the bus ride, but that would still look presentable if I had to join a meeting.

black Mary Jane flats for commuting

Over time, I stopped changing into the heels. The commuter shoes (similar, although I don’t remember paying that much) were just so . . . comfortable.

And while I’ve tried a few pairs of wedges recently, they’re just not as easy to wear as flats.

Plus, really, I don’t need to be taller. I think my height is somewhere around average, but I’m as tall as I need to be.

So I’m done (barring the occasional exception, I suppose) with heels.

Now I just need some new flats.

10 Things That Make Me Feel Like a Superhero

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Superhero in Transit

Who am I? Based on my superhero powers, I have a lot of identities.

1) The Unstoppable Force: Labor and delivery. ‘Nuff said.

2) The Emphathizer: I can (usually) snuggle and talk a tantrum away.

3) The Staunch Supporter: I can defend others against predators. Remember, “predator” is all in the perspective.

4) Arterial Flow: I am an O Negative blood donor. Type-specific is better, but in a pinch, anyone can use my blood.

5) Captain Persistence: Triathlons.

6) The Explicator: I can explain complex, unfamiliar topics so that anyone can understand them.

7) Madame Patience: I can read the same book over and over and over and over. And over.

8) Perspective Lady: I can watch Baguette eat something that has fallen onto an unfamiliar floor and say, “Immune System!”

9) The Adapter: I have managed to (mostly) surrender my sense that I should be making Baguette’s birthday cake.

10) The Amazing Prioritizer: That time-consuming thing that seems so important, but isn’t? I can let that go.

This list brought to you as a result of Monday Listicles.

Photo by jmv, via Flickr. Creative Commons.

Traditions: Easter Dinner

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Last year was our first effort at a family Easter. This year there was no snowshoeing, but we did dye and hide eggs.

Easter Eggs

Baguette hunted them, with help from Elmer the Patchwork Elephant.

Hunting7

Then there were deviled eggs.

Deviled Eggs

And Mr. Sandwich’s parents came over for a dinner of ham (my great-grandmother’s recipe),

Ham

roasted asparagus (shown here pre-roasting),

Asparagus

and beer bread (my grandmother’s recipe),

Beer Bread

as well as mashed potatoes and root vegetables and Lawry’s creamed corn.

I may have gone a little nuts.

Dessert–because I lacked time and energy to make a pound cake–was vanilla ice cream and lemon cookies, both from the store.

Verdict? The ham, asparagus, and creamed corn are definitely keepers–although we knew that going in, because I’ve made those before (a quick shout-out to Lawry’s for sharing their recipes, BTW). The beer bread was fine, but not at the top of the food priority list for us, and the mashed potatoes and root vegetables were tasty–but when Mr. Sandwich said, “I just really like your regular mashed potatoes,” well, let’s just say that it’s tough to embrace the experiment.


This post was not sponsored by Lawry’s. I just really like Lawry’s.