Essential Baby blogger Joseph Kelly
Frances and Maisie have borrowed one distinctive characteristic from my youth - the blond afro. While Maisie's curls have started to grow out, Frances has such a tightly sprung head of hair she looks like the unkempt spawn of Sideshow Bob. All of which is great until you try and run a comb through it.
Since starting school Maisie has, for better or worse, become more aware of her self image. The first area she target for improvement was her hair. She decided quite emphatically that curls were out and she couldn't possibly go to school until her hair was straight. In the absence of a complete follicle transplant, the best I could offer was a really tightly pulled ponytail. This turned out to be easier to suggest than execute.
The thing that little girls don't understand about their dads is that dads, on the most part, haven't grown up knowing how to plait hair, French or otherwise. They have never just thrown their hair into a bun and, speaking for myself, have never had to struggle with the complexity involved with achieving symmetrical piggy tails complete with a knife-edge straight centre part. In short, hair is not this dad's strong point. This, however, didn't cut any muster with Maisie who wanted me to break several laws of genetics by giving her a hairdo that would test the skills of Jo Bailey and Videl Sasoon combined.
Committed as I was to indulging Maisie's insecurities, I sat her in front of the bathroom mirror and armed myself with a hairbrush, an elastic and a handful of hair clips. Getting her hair brushed back was harder than I'd thought, mainly because Maisie decided to scream in agonising pain every time I ran the brush through her hair. When I suggested that it might be easier just to shave the whole lot off, Maisie burst into tears. Twenty seconds in and there was already screaming and tears. It could only get better.
Having got the bulk of Maisie's hair to the back of her head, all that was left to do was tie it into a ponytail. I'm sure women take this for granted, but being able to keep a ponytail taught with one hand while securing it with an elastic with the other is one of those life skills up there with juggling live kittens - if you pause to think about what you're doing you lose the magic. After what seemed like hours I was finally able to get a good bit of hair under a tightly wound elastic. To most passers-by it would look like a ponytail.
That left the front. If Maisie had any intention of making life easier for her dad she would grow her hair all the one length so that it all fits into a ponytail. Instead Maisie has decided to have a fringe complete with long wispy side bits, none of which are within the elastic's range. Maisie helpfully advised me that Susie uses clips to keep these wispy bits in place. What Maisie couldn't tell me was how on earth the clips worked. Even if you can work out how to open and close these maniacal devices, how do you get them to stay in the hair? Are they meant to be on an angle, or just straight up? Do they need to pierce the scalp in order to get some purchase? In the end I gave up and tried a large brown comb. While I could get this to anchor to the wispy bits, it refused to stay on Maisie's head, so it just acted as a sort of pendulum swinging past Maisie's face.
In the end I took a home handyman approach and whacked in several dozen bobby pins, just like I would if I was securing carpet underlay. This had the desired effect of keeping Maisie's hair in place and the undesired effect of making it look like it was applied with a staple gun. Happy with my handy work I marched Maisie to school. We had just made it in the gate when Molly's mum took one look at Maisie, looked up at me and said "So you did her hair this morning?".
Is there any part of your child's grooming that you just can't get the hang of? Comment on Joseph's blog.
