Mommy Maintenance

Harry Burns: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally Albright: Which one am I?
Harry Burns:You're the worst kind. You're high maintenance, but you think you're low maintenance.
-from When Harry Met Sally

Based on the wisdom of Harry, I am either truly low maintenance, or I am "the worst kind." I don't like people to spend money on me--ask Bear about my frequent suggestion that he buy me Bubble Tape for Christmas and call it a day--and I don't spend a ton of time, money, or energy on my appearance. This, by the way, is not necessarily something to brag about and comes at the expense of those forced to look at me on a daily basis. Again, talk to Bear.

My recent grumpy post aside, I can go eons without "me time" (a cheesy term I hate, but I'm too lazy to come up with an alternative phrase) and not even notice. On my non-work days, I sleep until the girls force me to join the realm of the living, and am with one or both of them every minute of the day--excluding, if I'm lucky, the occasional solo bathroom trip or the rare and exquisite Simultaneous Nap. As soon as they're both in bed, I'm ready to crash myself; so, really, the only time I am alone is when I'm in my car, on the way to and from work 2-3 days a week. When I became what Ross & Rachel's manny would call a Grumpus last week, it took me a few days to realize that maybe it was because I needed what Christian Siriano of "Project Runway" would call "a breaky-break." And yes, I just quoted two TV shows in one sentence. Shush.

So, last Tuesday, I took advantage of Bear's day off and headed out into the world for three straight hours, alone. Allllllll alone. Without a diaper bag, even. What a concept! My main objective was to get a haircut, which I hadn't done since I was 9 months pregnant with Elliana. Don't the professionals recommend a trim at least every...eight months or so? Maybe that's why I saw this pic of myself (on the left) from Thanksgiving and decided a change might do me some good:


That, my friends, is a head in dire need of some maintenance.

So off I went to a random hair salon (people who get haircuts every 8 months don't develop commitments to particular stylists), where a crazy woman with apparent psychic powers gave me exactly the haircut I wanted, without my even giving her a photo, and then declared in broken English, "You better like it--I spend a lot of my time on this hair!"

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. Part Two of my Mommy Maintenance Day involved a solo trip to Target--a dream come true!--where I decided it was time to lose my hair dye virginity and purchased a box of Clairol Natural Instincts semi-permanent hair color.

In red.

The result looked like this, in pictures:

(Note Ellie's look of shame and annoyance.)

In person, it looked more like this:


Or possibly this:


In other words, this was not the soft, natural red I had been hoping for...and as much as I enjoyed the above film, I wasn't too thrilled about the idea of walking around with flaming red hair for the next 28 shampoos (thank goodness for semi-permanence!). After consulting the internet, I read that Head & Shoulders shampoo would help mellow out the color, so I gave it 3 or 4 washings with that, and voila:


That's me now. Like, RIGHT now, this second, so don't mind my lack of visible makeup.

Thus endeth my adventures in mommy maintenance. Is the end result better than where I started? Grumpus-wise, yes--that three hours to myself did me a world of good. Appearance-wise? You be the judge.

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