Thursday, August 26, 2010

First Cornrows



Mysterious.

Adoption brings an obvious mystery into a family. I guess that any family addition brings some sense of mystery, but--in my experience--family additions without hereditary connection multiply the mystery considerably. The mystery involves various aspects of life: possible medical conditions, personality features, special talents and abilities, likes and dislikes, etc., etc.

This year, with the addition of Jadon and Andrew, the mysterious has taken on a whole new flavor: hair.

I wasn't completely ignorant going in. There's a lot of help out there for white families trying to learn about black hair care. And I did research. I think, however, when we knew we were getting two boys, I may have cut my research a bit short. The answer was simple! Ah, we can just buzz them!

Unfortunately (for me), from the moment our oldest could find the English language to describe his preferred hairstyle, he has presented it something like this:

"Don't ever cut my hair. I want it to grow this big (hands outstretched on either side of his head about 12 inches or so). I don't want to fit through the door." (Temperate, isn't he?)

So in the last 11 months, Andrew has gone from THIS

to THIS.
The next (completely mysterious for me) step has been figuring out what to do with all that hair. Today, we tried cornrows.

Cornrows are a traditional African hairstyle. In fact, ancient sculptures and hieroglyphs from centuries before Christ's birth depict a cornrow style of hair. Furthermore, this kind of braiding cuts down on the daily maintenance required to keep black hair healthy, which suits active children and a certain potentially busy mother just fine.

With a little searching, I found a lady in town who does them. This evening, she put nine braids in for Andrew. It took her less than an hour. (And that even included a couple breaks for our tender-headed guy. Still, Andrew admitted that he'd rather have her pulling on his hair for cornrows than me combing out his hair every day.) I watched her and might be willing to give this a try sometime in the future. Yet another mystery--but this one may be solvable.

Anyway, here's the current look on our big guy!

4 comments:

Helen said...

Andrew- Super cool! You look great. And a girl knows how to do something cool like that? You may have to learn that one, too. :)

Love you!

Helen

anxiously hopeful said...

Very cool! Cornrows are so convenient(especially when there are so many heads to get out the door on time for school)!

Karen said...

Oh I love that look!!! We are still using the Nudred based on your suggestion and loving that look too! Jayden even does it himself now and it looks so cool! ~Karen Wistrom

Mel McElhinney said...

That looks amazing! I can just imagine it getting longer and longer - cool! My mohalk boy would approve of this look, for sure!