Off With Her Dreads!

A while back, A friend of ours had a cootie scare, and I did our usual all-natural treatment to everyone in the house just in case we had been accidentally exposed.

We found something out during this adventure; shampoo does not flow easily through a congo. A congo happens when several dreads decide that it would be a fabulous idea to get together and have a party, combining to make one massive, inseparable, fat dread. This was not going to work for the preemptive cootie strike, and something was going to have to give.

I filled Ladybug in on the situation. Either we were going to have to tear or cut the congo into it's separate dreads again and maintain them as separate entities from now on, or they were going to have to go entirely. Now she's been talking about cutting off her dreads for the last 6 months or so, so this wasn't as big a thing as one might think. She loves her dreads, but isn't the greatest at caring for them, and wasn't quite patient enough to learn properly when she got them so they sort of started out on the wrong foot. They didn't really look like she'd planned them to either(even after almost a year and a half), so she decided to lop them off and start over some other time if she decided to do them again later. I cried a little like I knew I would.

We agreed on longest length leftover for the least amount of pain, and I began my work. I left two dreads at the front of her face so she could still have a bit of "personality and attitude" to her hair (as well as learn a bit more about how to properly care for dreads on a lesser scale) one inch of undreadded roots and two inches of dread beyond that were left once I finished mangling her head with the scissors. Cooking fat, vegetable oil, and about an hour under the hair dryer later, we were ready to try untangling the dread bits I had left in her head and cut it for style. It was a long and difficult process for us both, but after much howling, a lot of brushing with both fingers and comb, two washes, and a cut, I sent her to bed.

In the morning, we cut again, dry this time, for style, and another wash, to get off all those annoying hair bits that get stuck to you when you get a haircut. French style pixie cut with antennae, and we had a happy customer. Everyone else seemed pretty happy too (especially grandma, who never liked "those things" anyway. *chuckle*

Now Ladybug has her glorious shampoo commercial hair back, and still retains a couple of dreadlocks to play with, put beads in, and (soon, she says) put a couple of bells in for the holidays. *grin*

Hey, it's her head, right?

Tags: dreadlocks head lice lice locks locking dreads hair dreadlock removal hair cut congo