It took about three hours to get my daughter’s full head braided. I think, after two days of working with a less than enthusiastic child, it’s going to take about three hours to get it fully out. Yesterday I got her in the tub and we worked on getting the aluminum foil off the ends so we could remove the beads. The aluminum foil pieces were small and tightly wrapped around the ends of the braided hair. After weeks of salt water, pool water, showers and rounds and rounds of sunscreen, they were a mess to unwrap.
I had about sapped her willingness to help me (her help was minimal, mostly telling me which braids I couldn’t undo, namely any of them). I didn’t even get into the act of unbraiding because it was past bedtime and there are over forty individual braids, some basic braids and some the more complex corn row type.
Today when she got home she was assailed with all kinds of things she didn’t want to do. First we had to do drops and pressure medication. Next we had to take her pressure to report to her doctors prior to surgery next week. During that I annoyed her to no end (upset her is more like it) asking about how her vision was and what changes she’d observed. Getting real information out of her is hard, getting her to cooperate when all she wants you to do is leave her alone about her eyes makes it doubly hard. Telling her this was important for her future vision put pressure on her I had no choice about—I had to have some real answers.
After sending an email to her doctors and surgeons while she ate dinner I told her it was time to start the unbraiding. The only way I accomplished this was by letting her listen to her audio book (Harry Potter book five) while I combed each braid out individually. My back is screaming at me now and I’m only about two-thirds done. Tomorrow I’m going to have to stick her in the tub and finish the job.
The thing about her hair is it’s gross. Even though I tried to wash it last night, the strands were on top of each other in the braids and couldn’t be cleaned well. I have greasy, sticky hands from unbraiding her hair so far. Right now she looks like Rosane Rosanadana from Saturday Night Live. Her hair is about as frizzy and “poofy” as my daughter calls it as it could possibly be.
Tomorrow it will be washed, washed again, washed a third and possibly up to five times to get all the gunk off the strands. Then we’ll dry it and it will be her nice hair that I love again. She’s loved the braids though. I think she might go dreadlocks when she gets older given how much she’s liked having to do nothing to her hair.
The Big Boy Update: My son told me yesterday, “lately I’ve been thinking about middle school…because I’m half-way to middle school.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter reported having, “laser eyes” the other day. The way she described it sounded alarming in a way, like possible retinal detachment. So I’ve been in conversation with her VI teacher at school to gather information from my daughter, two of my daughter’s surgeons and her pediatric ophthalmologist to find out if we need to be concerned and if, for any reason, this means we shouldn’t proceed with the surgery in a week. Everyone wanted to defer to Dr. Trese, since he’s the retinal expert and knows my daughter’s eyes the best. I wrote everything up this afternoon and sent an email. He responded quickly and said he didn’t see a reason not to proceed and was glad things sounded like they were going well. The net of the situation was that while my daughter was experiencing some variations in vision, they didn’t sound like signs of retinal distress in any way. So we’re a go for surgery this coming Wednesday.
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