Peanut's First Beads – "Can I use foil?"

One more hair hurdle has been crossed. Last night, I adorned Peanut's two-strand twists with three simple beads: two small while cylinders and one medium pink star shape at the bottom.

Earlier this week, I had Peanut's hair in a simple two-strand twist style with large white sunflower barrettes at the base of each twist. And she looked adorable. The hairstyle took this rather fat-fingered unskilled Daddy-Papa two plus days to do when accounting for the breaks: Washing and parting on day one, and oiling and twisting on day two. From a skill perspective, the two-strand twist is super easy to do. However, with a squirmy 2 yo hairstyling can get cumbersome as Peanut's head is darting left and right chasing colorful elastic bands that I had given her as a distraction. Ok, so that was my Saturday and Sunday night. Monday, I take Peanut to school and I get lots of gasps and praise for Peanut's hairstyle. Most declare a mild shock that "the Dad" was able to do the hair thing. Of course, I always beam with pride with my little girl looking so proper.

Two days later, Peanut is playing in the sandbox and true to form takes a good shovel-full of sand and covers her hair with it. The oil and the braids while sleek and pretty do an excellent job at firmly fixing the sand grains onto the scalp. I was hoping to get 5-7 days out of the style… now what? I could fret over the loss of my work or look at this as an opportunity to try something new that might not succeed. Beads!

A short time back I had realized that the hair/beauty supply place that I was going to didn't have a large selection of basic little girl hair stuffs (barrettes, elastics…). But, I still went there each time hoping for something new to show up, and it never did. This time on my way home from work, I stopped at a new hair care place. And found, a plethora of beads, snaps (didn't know what a snap was) and other fun hair embellishments.

Now, I had thought about beads in the past but I have always wondered how to keep the beads on the head without falling off. Are they sewn in? What about foil? I had seen little girls with balls of foil on the ends of their hair but that looked rather tacky. There must be another way. So, I put myself out there and asked the shop assistant. God, it never gets easy to ask for help on the kids' hair. Everyday I feel the weight of judgment from strangers. And to openly admit that I don't know something makes me feel that much more vulnerable. To my surprise, I got the most wonderful response. The assistant helped me pick-out some silver snaps (finally found out what those are) and other beads but also, gave me unsolicited admiration on Sierra hairstyle. Even with Sierra's head full of sand and three days worth of fuzzys cropping up it still made me feel worthy that someone said that I was on the right path. Thank you shop assistant, you made my day.

Later that evening, I rinsed the sand out of Peanut's hair opting to not address the fuzzys in the interest of time and not re-doing the twist. I let Peanut and Tiger play with some of the beads while I figured out how to get the intended star beads on the twists. Then the big technical question, how to secure the beads? I tried the snaps, they looked ok but the scale was all wrong – too big. Foil? What if I used just a tiny piece of aluminum foil and tightly wedged the foil ball into the star bead so that it wasn't visible? It worked. In a short amount of time, Peanut had a completely new look. Score one for Daddy-Papa!

My little girl has her first set of beads. I couldn't be prouder to watch her little head swish side to side and hear the gentle click-click.