Donate a chunk of hair to locks of love - Bucketlist #51

I've been in a hair funk for quite some time. Post TC I pretty much wore a standard-issue mom ponytail for two years, all about function with zero style or styling requirements. I had bangs for a while, which gave me the illusion that I had some sort of actual hair style, but eventually I realized I wasn't really keeping up with those either (my hair grows fast and I wasn't making it out for solo haircuts very often, even if they were fast and cheap, and NO WAY was I doing it myself. I have no skills for haircutting). As TC has grown and I've been able to steal a few moments away I'd started to sort of style my hair for some special occasions - I'd flat iron out the weird ripples that developed during my pregnancy, curl the ends under, it would look okay:

Christmas 2012

But I soon realized that even when my hair started out looking presentable, it would mat and knot under it's own friction and by the end of the day I'd have a huge rat's nest at the base of my neck. It was embarassing, I'm sure it looked awful, and it sucked to try and comb (rip) out. I don't know how people with long hair do it, if they just have thinner hair than I do, or brush it every hour, or use some magic product, but I couldn't take it. I was sick of the ponytail, and couldn't hack keeping it down, so I did some measurements and determined it was time to tackle bucketlist #51 - donate to locks of love.

Donations need to be a minimum of 10", so I divided my hair into 4 ponytails and put binders around 11" up, meaning the first cut was about 12" off.

My  hair is so thick, I think I get credit for 2 or 3 donations for this :) It was like an actual pony's tail when I wrapped it all up.

I didn't take any photos at the salon, I purposefully left my camera at home because the pressures of this mega cut were enough without feeling like I had to be in photos right away. The strange ladies next to me appeared to take several photos though, and couldn't stop asking me about what was going on (shouldn't going to the salon be relaxing? Who does that to other people?!?!) and basically narrating the whole experience (you're  not helping!)

I don't have any great "after" photos yet, but I definitely feel a foot lighter. The new cut makes more sense with the new texture of my hair (I got wavy during pregnancy, so it was really weird to have 4" of waves then straight for 16". Awkward), it's low fuss and dries quickly, or I can curl/iron it up for a different look. It looks WAY lighter in color with all the bulk gone too, neither good nor bad, but interesting.

I doubt I'll ever have hair this long again, so I'm glad I could make it count - the hair will help sick little girls feel better about their appearance with custom fit hairpieces, definitely a worthy cause.

Toys for Other Tots

I've (hopefully) started a couple of holiday traditions for our family: the annual ornament, setting up the tree, and donating a toy each year to charity. The latter is still in it's formative stages - in theory we would all go together as a family and pick something out that was meaningful, but time was against us this year so in the final days before collections ended I grabbed something on my own during a rare solo shopping trip. I still tried to make it meaningful by picking a doll that reminded me of The Cupcake:

 

It was barely in our house for 24 hours before I remembered to grab it on my way to a meeting at a school that was collecting for toys for tots, but it was just enough time for TC to see her. And go completely nuclear when she was not allowed to "had it! had it!"

Guess we have some work to do on the "Christmas Spirit", eh?

The doll made it to the charity, the kid eventually recovered from her blubbery puddle on the floor, and has since started to play with her own dolls (which are more age appropriate and have less hair to destroy).