I had a bad hair day

Yesterday was our third anniversary. It started out like any other day: laid jake down for his nap, took a shower and started doing my hair extra nice for our date night plans....and that's where it stopped being like any other day.

 First I must say, which after reading this post won't need saying, I am not a super girly girl. I like looking nice but it doesn't come naturally to me like it does to some. Sure, I do make up fine, but my hair has ALWAYS been a source of frustration. I almost wonder if I should go to beauty school JUST so I can learn to do my and my daughters' hair (if we have girls) for the rest of our lives. Because I grew up in the 90s and had curly, fine, slightly frizzy hair, I was always jealous of straight-haired girls. TRUST ME. ALL the popular girls had straight hair-that's when the popular flat iron/super straight look got popular started by Jennifer Aniston on friends etc.

I remember on a youth temple trip in Houston, (the houston temple wasn't built yet so we would rent a charter bus and go to Dallas), some older pretty girls took pity on me, and since my hair was wet from the baptisms for the dead, introduced me to mousse for curly hair. For the first time I loved my curly hair-it looked good and wasn't frizzy-WHA?! Freshman year of High School a friend who also had curly hair introduced me to the flat iron. I could FINALLY have that sleek shiny straight hair I've always wanted! I had tried to use the blow dryer but it ALWAYS makes my hair puffy and frizzy-even with a diffuser so the flat iron was huge.

These two tricks-mousse and a flat iron are all I can really do with my hair. I never really bothered to learn any other way of doing my hair. Lately I've wanted to start branching out with hair styles etc. This being tricky since I have no natural abilities when it comes to hair. I know it sounds ridiculous but I never used bobby pins growing up. I just never did-back before I learned to control my hair those big clips were in fashion so I'd use those. Never mastered the bobby. So here I am, 27 years old, and I'm starting to use bobby pins. Also, I never really learned how to use a curling iron. Hello, I HAVE naturally curly hair, so I hated all forms of curls: natural or otherwise. But now, I have matured and realize that it does in fact look nice. I also, never really learned a good way to blow dry my hair cause, as mentioned earlier, it always made my hair poofy so I kind of avoided it.

So yesterday I was excited to try out a new round brush that I had bought (always had a paddle brush growing up/never used round brushes). I of course notice in the salons that the girls are able to get my hair pretty straight with a round brush and only need to use a flat iron a lil bit so I wanted to try and replicate what they do. So I brush through my hair, then pick a section of hair and roll it up in my brush ready to blow dry it out. It took exactly 2.5 seconds. I go to pull on the brush/bring it back down releasing my hair when, instead of unrolling, it just seizes even tighter on my hair. No amount of pulling could get the brush out. How could it be so unbelievably stuck after one roll of the brush?

 At first I stay calm. I can figure this out-I'm no stranger to tangles. So I start messing with it a bit-trying to manually remove my hair from the brush. Nothing happening. After 30-40 min of struggling I start to realize that I need a second pair of eyes here. Luckily Megan is with us until she starts at BYU next week so she could watch jake. I call Code and tell him the situation. As always he drops everything and comes running to my aid (I love having a husband who, when forced, can work from anywhere = AMAZING flexibility). So he gets home and starts working at it. We tried a lot of things: getting the hair wet, putting conditioner in it to make it slippery, cutting the lil balls off the brush bristles hoping it would make it easier to get the hair out etc. After 3 (yes 3) hours of repeated attempts to work it's way out it's a no go. It was still pretty stuck in there, though it was a lil looser, but not much. I could tell Code was losing his normally chipper/positive attitude and that this was more serious than I realized. (and yes I was crying off and on about the ridiculousness of the situation). So we start calling around to salons to see if anyone can see us. At this point Code was calling cause I was crying harder at the prospect of walking into a salon with all those eyes staring at me. Sorry girls, but you can be really judgemental when you all get together-something about concentrated estrogen in a small space. While I love getting my hair done, I hate all the gossiping and back biting that one overhears at salons-its kinda intimidating to me.

So we finally find a place that answered their phones and could work us in. Studio K in provo. Where is it? I ask, "oh, it's in the riverwoods." WHAT?!?! I freaked. It's one thing to go in to some free standing salon and be humiliated, but I have to walk through the riverwoods??? (a shnazzy, outdoor shopping mall in provo). More tears. Code was unbelievably supportive and understanding tho I'm sure his male brain was getting frustrated at my shallowness of not wanting to be seen with a hair brush hanging from my head. Finally it was 3 and we were quickly running out of options. I storm to the car so mad that this was happening to me. We walk in and THANKFULLY it was not in the middle of riverwoods so we didn't have to walk through the mall, but park right outside and run in. We walk in and thankfully there was a partition separating the majority of the salon from the view of the doors/reception desk. The receptionist came over and brought a girl from the back. She was really nice and sympathetic. I must have looked like death-it's def how I felt. No make up. A brush hanging from my head, my eyes all red from crying all day. She took me a seat (thankfully there were only a few clients in that day), and went back to get back up. She brought a friend who strangely wasn't even scheduled for the day but decided to come in anyway (can you say TENDER MERCY?!). They apologized again and again that this happened to me and cursed the brush and said we should burn it etc. They made jokes about getting me pain killer and got to work. They asked what I was trying to do my hair for and Code said it was our anniversary. Instantly they were "awwwing" and "oh-my-goshing" at how horrible this was etc. An HOUR and a HALF LATER the brush was finally out. I cried again, this time out of relief. They babied my hairs with tonic stuff and then were nice enough to curl my hair for me for our night out.

I really liked the salon and at this point I don't think I could ever feel embarrassed in front of those girls-it's like we've moved past any sort of surface level relationship. Needless to say we left her a BIG tip. The receptionist, Mic, kept coming back and checking on how it was going/was supportive, and when the brush finally came out everyone around me-even the clients cheered/and were sympathetic. I think I found my new salon-I liked the vibe in there and now I KNOW they can handle/fix ANYTHING. It's probably not the way they try to get clients, but it worked for them this time.

I think I cured myself of feeling discomfort/intimidated in a salon- everyone was so nice and there's no way I could EVER feel THAT embarrassed again. So the brush got stuck around 11 and we got it out at 5:30. Needless to say my head was raw/so sore/still felt like there was a brush hanging from my head still. Since Megan had been babysitting all day we went home to relieve her and we all went out to cracker barrel for dinner, which I was fine with cause I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast that morning. After we got home and put jake to bed we went out for our lil anniversary activity Code had planned.

 We ended up going up to Sun Dance resort for their moonlit ski lift rides. Apparently during the summer months, whenever there is a full moon, they turn on the lifts and you can ride them up and back down the mountain. It was really cool and we had a fun time (once we found how to bring the lap-bar down....yeah it was a tense couple of minutes- lift operator FAIL). Though it was a hard day, I was reminded again why I love Code so much. He is positive-no matter how bad the circumstance seems, He is UNBELIEVABLY PATIENT-prolly why he's so good at his technical job/finding solutions to bugs etc, and why he kept picking at my hair for 3 hours saying nothing but encouraging things, I (and jake) am his number one priority-even if he has to leave work in the middle of the day cause his wife got a brush stuck in her hair, and He's ALWAYS loving and supportive/sensitive to my needs. Were we able to laugh about it afterwards? yes, and we decided that it will definitely be one of our more memorable anniversaries. Let's just hope our future anniversaries will be memorable for more positive reasons...

Felt like this:

But I looked like this thanks to studio K and bethany!!! you ROCK!

(those are the lifts in the background)

 Thank you Code for running to my rescue and finding me help when you couldn't fix it! One of these years we are bound to have a NORMAL anniversary :)