3 girls, 3 heads of hair, 1 mom in tears

For any of you who have met my beautiful girls, you know that they all have very thick long hair.  Its this hair that drives me to the brink every weekend. Of my three girls, two are extremely tender headed.  This makes all involved absolutely miserable.  Washing hair usually means tears. LOTS of them.  I'm exhausted once I finished what inevitably takes 3-5 hours by time I finish.  And that is just my middle child's head.  I can usually finish the other two within thee hours each.    You may ask - How can it possibly take that long?  Glad you asked - Depending on the style it can take me an hour just unravel all of the braids.  Then comes washing and conditioning their natural hair.  This can take a while just because of how thick their hair is.  And over the years I realized that I can't just scrub their hair when I'm washing it.  I have to "rake" through it to keep the tangles down to a minimum. Once I washed and conditioned, then most of the time I cornrow their hair so that I don't have to do it again immediately.   But this only really works if you manage to complete a head every weekend with out fail.  When a head gets missed, the hair styles can get fuzzy and look bad. 

My Bright idea:  I'll take the girls to a salon to get their hair done and make my life a little easier.  The way this salon works is similar to an assembly line.  The place is huge.  It has 3 large rooms with stylists working on hair.  The main room is full of hair dryers - like twenty of them, maybe more.  Their idea is to cram in as many people in for a cheap price.  My niece had visited the shop a couple of months ago. It took them a while, but she left with a cute style and happy.  My girls on the other hand were dealing with a group of young ladies who have no concept of customer service.  The salon has no style books in it, so my girls were unsure of what styles they offered.  The stylist didn't offer any suggestions.  I tried to throw out some ideas, all they told me was what they couldn't do for their Natural hair.  One told me with a slight neck roll, that "I have kids and I know that wont work."  I see.  This experience is going to be needlessly more complicated than it needs to be.  I tell her fine  - just put the 4 year old in ponytails and call it a day.  The older two went off with directions to just blow dry the hair I would manage to "do the impossible" on my own.  I sit back a bit annoyed, but I take a deep breath, pull out my appendage (my iphone) and start to unwind a bit.

Crying:  Within two minutes I'm summoned into the other room where my 4 year old is screaming  and crying while the "neck-roller" continues to roll her neck and try to do my child's head. Bad combination. ( I want to note here that although tender headed, I have had my 4 yr old's her hair professionally braided by a woman who specializes in working with kids with NO problems, not one tear). We tried everything to get my now exhausted child to sit still while the neck-roller combs through her STILL DIRTY hair.  Unbelievable.  Dirty hair or not, I just wanted to have the neck-roller put my child hair in bows so that I could leave.  My child is screaming bloody murder.  I'm sweating, and feeling allllllll of the eyes on me from the 30 or so other patrons in the salon.  Finally I say enough, cry "uncle" and waive the white flag. In spite of the fact that my child's hair is in a lop-sided afro,  I limp up to the front (I'm still on crutches), I pay my bill and wait in the car for the other girls to finish.  Now that we are in the car.  My child starts crying for a new reason - she wants her hair done.  This is the point where I start crying.  Now both of us are in the car whimpering like 4 year olds - at least she has an excuse.