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Bug turns ELEVEN! (and gets blue hair!)
Can you believe Bug is ELEVEN?!!! Of course you can’t. Neither can I. It was like yesterday when she was born. I get heart palpitations every time I take a picture of her and she looks like a teenager already. But I can’t stop time and I can’t stop her. This girl is a powerhouse and she just keeps growing up every day!
Bug has wanted to dye her hair blue for about two years. Her cousins constant chameleon hair-change-ups might have something to do with it and her obsession with anime and changing her minecraft skins etc… If you know Bug you know how she is about color. Color is her thing and she has strong opinions.
Of course I told her that dying her hair was a silly idea and gave her about a thousand lectures on how pretty her hair was naturally. But as you can see she wore me down. And wore me down some more. Because I love my crazy girl and I really wanted to give her a present that would make her really really happy. I caved!
Off to the salon we went! Bug has a favorite salon and a favorite stylist. She’s way more loyal to her stylist than I ever have been. It might have something to do with her stylist being 24 and a really cool surfer dude but he always does a really good job with her hair and we make a special treat out of it when we go. You know, macarons at Lette, hotdog from the hotdog stand. It’s our bi-annual thing.
At first, when we started to take the hair-coloring subject seriously, I thought we’d go to a beauty college and save some $$$ but then I got worried that I might fry her hair and I’d ruin her (red flag number 1). So we opted to ask her stylist for a recommendation and he recommended Ally.
We set the appointment and waited for the day with great anticipation. It was crazy how excited we were. Then the day came and the bleaching began. BLEACHING. Oh-my-goodness. I bleached my daughter’s beautiful long healthy honey-blonde hair?!!! Who am I? This so wrong on so many levels. (Red flag number 2.)
The plan was to lighten Bug’s hair to a white blonde and then apply a blue-indigo ombre effect to that white blonde. It was a great plan. But then as Ally started blow-drying out the blonde, Bug and I both gasped at how pretty it was. It was this amazing out-of-the-bottle blonde color that every Californian aspires to. We thought, maybe we should keep the blonde and just apply the dark ombre indigo-teal color to the underneath in a cool peek-a-boo effect. In fact, that idea sat with me even better because the blonde was more natural, right? (Red flag number 3 with blinking lights and a siren!)
But then as she finished blow-drying and I saw the blonde getting brassy all the way up to Bug’s eyes, I started to feel anxious. I couldn’t ignore the sirens going off in my head any more. My kid should not look like this. This is the kind of blonde ombre effect grown women on Real Housewives of Orange County have. I started to feel sick to my stomach. But Bug loved it and was over the moon! Ally curled it all pretty and Bug felt like a golden princess. I was a ball of mixed feelings with alarms going off in my head.
By the time we got to her Dad’s house (she was at his house that week) I was experiencing a full panic attack over her hair. Sweating, my heart hurt… How could I have done this to my child! She looked like Iris from Taxi Driver and it was just wrong. Poor Bug had no idea why I was getting so upset. She started crying and I was crying. It’s amazing I could even drive. We were a mess.
Thankfully, Toby didn’t lose his marbles over my mistake when we got to the door and I exploded all of my worries and concerns. He agreed it didn’t look right for an eleven-year-old and we all decided we’d go back to the salon to fix it as soon as possible and stick to the original blue plan.
But Bug loved her blonde hair. It was such a mixed bag of emotions. On the morning of her next appointment Bug and I took an early morning walk with the dogs. She wore her rollerblades (her favorite accessory these days) and I took a few photos (with the dogs pulling me this way and that) just so we could remember how pretty it was. We put her hair up in tight Princess Lea buns so the swirls of blue showed through. It didn’t seem quite so offensive. I wanted to take more photos but we ran out of time. I’m glad we have these though.
It was such an emotional experience for both Bug and I, I know we will remember it for years. Someday we’ll laugh about it.
Back to the salon we went. This time with strict instructions to be pastel blue, indigo blue, and teal blue and nothing else. Everyone at the salon totally understood our concerns and they happily fixed her up into the prettiest mermaid princess you have ever seen. Bug was sad to see her golden locks wash down the drain in a puddle of purple but it was best. And we know the blue will wash out over time and the blonde will come back slowly and not so shockingly. AND best of all it’s just hair. It will grow back to her pretty honey blonde someday. And no she’s not getting another hair-dye-job as a birthday present ever again.
The blue turned out to be so much cooler in the end. I feel like I have my eleven-year-old back again. My crazy, cool, color-obsessed eleven-year-old. This is just so Bug.
I love you to pieces, you big blue smurf-head. Which Bug is quick to correct and let me know that smurfs have blue skin NOT blue hair. (eye roll)
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Cake the Cat Costume!
You know what happens when your mom makes costumes regularly for her blogging job? You think store-bought costumes are the best thing ever. It happened to me too. My mom sewed a pumpkin costume for me and my brother when we were little. We wore cute little green hats and green tights and we were the cutest round chubby pumpkins you ever did see. I would give a zillion dollars to see a photo of us back then but guess what? I HATED THAT COSTUME! I wanted to be like the other kids who got to wear make up and dress up as gypsies and black cats. There were no princess costumes back then or I’m sure I would have wanted to be that too.
Bug humored me with the Galaxy Costume and she really did genuinely love it but you know what she really really really wanted deep down? A store-bought Fionna from Adventure Time costume. This is where I have to look sheepish and admit I have never even watched Adventure Time and I don’t really know what my kid watches when she is with her dad so it might be highly inappropriate but I figured if Bethany’s kids watched that show and they loved it then it must not be too terrible. Annalie actually has great taste. So I ordered it from one of those costume sites while we drove down the road on the way to Payam’s mom’s house. (Don’t worry, I wasn’t driving.) It was a total impulse buy to appease my kid for some other unfairness that I have completely forgotten about. Then later (of course) I did a little research and fretted about the shortness of the skirt and the hoochiness of the knee socks. That’s how I parent.
Bug was on the moon. She couldn’t wait for that costume to arrive. She talked about it constantly. She even talked Joon into being Cake the Cat as her companion. Only problem was that there weren’t any Cake the Cat costumes that we could order online.
You know what that means!!! I had to make Joon a Cake the Cat costume. Poor me! Hahahahahhahaha!
That was the best thing ever for me. Joon and I headed off to Target to find a big fluffy white sweatshirt. Then we waited in line at the fabric store for our 1/8 yard of off-white felt and 1 yard of yellowish-orange felt. Or maybe it’s blanket felting. It’s nice durable fabric, not the kind that falls apart in the wash.
Joon loves helping me with projects. She is my number one assistant. Unlike Bug who has been there, done that and is so over it already. Joon loves to tag along with me everywhere. She even told the cutting lady what we needed while I took a quick bathroom break. When we got home I got to work. I sewed up a tail (trying not to make it look like a penis, which is totally hard!), some ears and cut out some big orange-yellow spots. Then I attached everything to the sweatshirt. It took a while and the felting kinda moved as I sewed, making everything ever-so-slightly off center but Joon LOVED IT!!
She wanted to wear it the day I made it which was days before the Halloween parade at school and Halloween itself. She wanted to wear it as a sweatshirt to school the next day and pajamas that night. Joon’s appreciation for my homemade costume swelled my heart up so big.
Unfortunately, it also brought out the green-eyed monster in Fionna. Nothing went right with her store-bought costume. The skirt was age-appropriately knee-length and not butt-hugging like the character in the cartoon. The shirt didn’t fall off her shoulder. Her hair was the wrong color and everything WAS ALL WRONG! It was a disaster. So I gave in and altered the store-bought costume. Not too terribly hoochie-mama but just a little bit. It was a compromise. Then I let her wear some really light pink blush and lip gloss and all was well again. The things I do, man. Parenting winner over here.
Anyway, Cake the Cat was awesome and Fionna was too. They actually even hung out together at the school dance/parade which is huge for Bug because she’s the cool kid and little half sisters are so uncool. I know. We are working on that. They actually get along famously but you know how it goes.
