Hair - Oh the Things We Can Do With You!

We are a little obsessed at our house right now with different hair styles. As I said in an earlier post, Cute Girls Hairstyles and Hair and Make-up By Steph have become must reads. 

The Cute Girls Hairstyles {let's just call it CGH, so much easier to type ;)} is mainly for my daughter, however, there are some in there that work on me as well. 

With The Hunger Games movie just out, Mindy from CGH has been busy perfecting those braids and I, of course, love anything to do with The Hunger Games. I just wish my hair or my daughter's was just a little.bit.longer so we could try those out. Patience. Patience. Quit whining, I know.

As we've been trying out these different hairstyles we've taken some pics. What I love best is that most of the time the braid or style I wear or my daughter has, is my first try! That just goes to show you how easy they really are.

I've always struggled with a simple French braid. Who struggles with a French braid? I had super long hair when I was in high school and I never perfected the French braid? Seriously? Nope, never, repeat Ne-Ver been able to do one! Frustrates the crap out of me. But tonight after watching just one little video {here} I went over to my daughter's freshly washed hair and by holding my hands kind of upside-down from what I would normally do {and then, of course, lose my grip on the three separate pieces of hair, and scream in frustration and...anyway}...VOILA! By George I Think She's Got It! A perfect French braid! Yeah me! She's already in bed though and time got away from me so I didn't get a picture of it. No problem Mon {sorry, I just got back from a getaway with my hubby to Jamaica and I can't seem to stop talking like the Jamaicans!} I'll get that picture another day, plus it is a simple French braid, I can do better then that!

So here are some of the styles that we've tried.
This one is on Mini-Me - it is the Bohemian Braid.

You can find the instructions from Cute Girls Hairstyles here. Mini-Me's hair isn't quite as long as Mindy's daughters but we still made it work. The bus arrived a little early this morning, so she missed it. But No Problem Mon! ;)


This one is one I tried on myself after seeing a bunch of pics here on Hair and Make-up by Steph
It is just a simple single twist. Super easy to do, just use lots of bobby pins and it's done. 

The last one I've tried on myself if a side fish tail braid. Again, my hair isn't as long as Steph's, but it still worked and I got tons of compliments.

You can find her instructions here.


All in all, we are just having a fun time trying out the different styles. We're telling our friends about it and they are trying out the different styles. It could be a great bonding experience for us, I guess, if we could figure out how to not bicker while I do Mini-Me's hair! If you can figure that one out let me know!
How about you? Have you tried any new styles lately? I'd love to hear about them or even see pics of them!

~Amy

Happy St. Patty's Day ~ Crazy Hair and Green Food Anyone?!

I'm definitely not Irish, more like Swedish and Danish and {as my Dad says} some Heinz 57 {not sure what that means, so maybe I do have a little Irish in me!}
That's OK, I don't need to be Irish to enjoy St. Patrick's Day. Any excuse to have some crazy hair, make something green and just have fun!

{This is kind of a two sectioned blog-in-one, if there is such a thing. I seemed to get a little wordy today, but I just have so much to share and it is all regarding St. Patty's Day and well, that's today so I'm just going to put it all out there! [deep breath] Sorry!}
Even though St. Patrick's Day is on Saturday this year, the kids still wanted to wear their green and have crazy hair on Friday for school. So thanks again to the Cute Girls Hairstyles website that my 7 year-old daughter {I like to call her Mini-Me} has been surfing around on, we decided to try a new four leaf clover style on her. The Boy didn't want to be left out and he had all sorts of ideas to try. First he wanted me to take green pipe cleaners and wind them around his hair to stand straight up, kind of like a mo-hawk! WOW – OK? So I tried this and it just wasn't working. He had just gotten out of the shower and we were getting ready for bed, so I thought, you want a mo-hawk, we'll make you a mo-hawk. We took some of Mini-Me's pony holders and put them in his wet hair.

This way when he wakes up in the morning it will be dry and hopefully standing straight up on end. I figure his hair is usually crazy in the morning anyway so this should work great!
And, of course {wink} I was right, it did stand straight up! Throughout the night a couple of the pony holders fell out and Mini-Me pipes in that this is because the leprechauns were being naughty again and took them out while he was sleeping. They thought this was great...I don't know about you, but having little, possibly green men, running around in my room in the middle of the night really freaks me out!!!
Anyway, I took some green hairspray and a comb and ratted his hair straight down the middle, then sprayed it with the green hairspray.  I find with this stuff, if you dry it with a hair dryer right after you spray it, it stays in longer and with a mo-hawk keeps its shape better.

Then on to Mini-Me. We are in a hurry now since we have 15 minutes {THAT'S 15 MINUTES - AHHHHHH!!} until the bus gets here to take them to school. And why oh why didn't I practice this hairstyle at least once before the actual day we needed to do it, but that would take a lot of organization and time management on my part, not gonna happen!
I had opened up the  Cute Girls Hairstyles website and got the picture and instructions on my kitchen computer the night before {that was a bit organized, right?}, then got all the green pony holders, and we decided to wind green pipe cleaners in the clover. Again, the instructions on this site are a.maz.ing! I had to have The Boy, to his horror, hold the hair pieces for me while I twisted them with the green pipe cleaners. We held each pair of twists with little clips while we got the others twisted. Yikes, that is a lot of twisting!
Here is the final product of Mini-Me's hair!

Sorry, my photography skills are a little lacking.

Here are the munchkins - LOVE THE SOCKS!

OK - here is the second section:

This morning we I wanted to try and make something a little special for St. Patty's day so I found an Irish Soda Bread recipe on an awesome blog - Plain Chicken – her website is here! I didn't have any buttermilk so I googled substitutions for buttermilk and found an easy recipe here! All you need is milk and lemon juice – oh yea, I have that! We also wanted it to be, of course, you guessed it, green so we added some food coloring.
We got all of our ingredients together – Mini-Me decided to help out! We started by making our buttermilk, I used skim milk since that is what I had in the house, buttermilk sounds so fattening so I'm guessing this makes the recipe a little healthier for us! Bonus! After setting the timer for 5 minutes so the lemon juice and milk could do whatever it is they magically do to make our buttermilk, Mini-
Me measured out the flour, baking soda and salt.

When the 5 minutes was up she added in the green food coloring.

Poured the green buttermilk into the flour mixture and we have our dough. 

How easy is that?!

I should mention at this point in case you would like to know what exactly the dough looks like, my adorable, sweet Mini-Me says, "it looks like someone sneezed out a big ol' green snotty thing!" NICE!

It didn't stop her from trying out that snotty dough, though...

Gotta love her for that!

Next, pour it into the greased bread pan and bake for 35 minutes. Plain Chicken suggested serving it with honey butter, but I used up all my honey last week so we improvised and made cinnamon sugar butter instead {just added my cinnamon/sugar mixture to some softened butter} and why not make it green cinnamon sugar butter! Perfect! 
Nows the real test to see if the fake buttermilk works...sliced it up, buttered it up and does it pass the taste test of the munchkins {and Mom}? 

   

YEAH – it does! IT WORKED! I CAN DO THIS!

That's two weekends in a row now that I've baked?! What is happening to me?! Starting easy and small must be the trick!
So, what special things are you doing for St. Patty's Day? Anything fun with the kids or for you adults? The adults in our house are going to a St. Patty's Day Party tonight – Green Beer Anyone?!!

~Amy

Hairstyle Experimentation

I find in life, I can go from one subject to another very quickly. I can hear someone say one little thing and that will spark a memory for me on another subject, that will sometimes spark an idea on another subject all together. So then when I decide to talk out loud to my friends, sometimes I get that look from them and it seems a little random. 

source

I’m finding this in the blog world as well. I will be reading one of my regular favorite blogs, they will cite another blog, so I click on that link and that blog will cite another blog! Ugh! I think you see where I’m going … but why am I telling you this? Well, I wanted to give you an idea of how I got to this section that I’m starting on this blog.

Here’s the road map…I went to the 6 Sisters Stuff blog one day and they had a guest blogger on their site, see here.

This guest blogger was Stephanie from Hair and Make-Up by Steph. She…is…awesome! I loved the post so much that I went to her blog to check out what else she has to say. As you may know, I have a daughter who is always wanting her hair braided in a French braid. I have such an issue with French braids. I’m not quite sure why, but Stephanie has a link on this blog to her post on braids. See here.

This Braid Breakdown was magnificent! She has some videos out there that show step by step instructions on how to braid in different ways that even I can follow!!!! 

LOVE IT!!!!! I’m so excited! <Do a little dance>  

Well, on Stephanie’s blog she has a link to a YouTube video by a mother who has her own blog called….wait for it….Cute Girls Hairstyles!!! JACKPOT!

See her site here:  Cute Girls Hairstyles! 

See, I told you how I get to a topic in my head or in the blog world always has a great road map!

So, back to my whole point of this post…my daughter and I have decided that we are going to start trying these different styles. I’m going to try them on myself and see how hard it is to do them by myself and also try them on my daughter. We’ll take pictures when we try a new one and post them on here for you to see.

My first time reading this blog I was so excited to try the fish tail braid I couldn’t wait for my daughter to get home from school. So I blindly tried it on myself. I didn’t take a picture of that one...I tried...but holding a phone camera to the back of your own head just wasn’t working. So the next morning, after showing the very cool website to my daughter, I tried the fishtail braid! It worked on the first try and was soooo easy. See the instructions here. 

I definitely recommend checking out her YouTube videos. She does such an excellent job of explaining step by step how to do the braid. 

 Isn't it cute!  I can't believe I did that!

I'll have to try another one on myself and have the munch-kin take a picture of it. 

Thanks so much Mindy!!! You are a life saver! OK, not really a life saver, but we are going to be super cool at school now with our new braids!!!

Now I can’t wait for a crazy hair day at school so we can try them out. Even my son, who seems to think he needs to have shaggy hair these days, wants a crazy hair day and wants me to find something for him online so if he has a crazy hair day I can do something wild and different to him. So what do you think? Do you have any ideas for fun braids or crazy hair days? Even for boys? 

~Amy