Hair

Obviously, when you are pregnant you wonder what the baby will look like.  I was mainly concerned with her hair.  I loved babies with hair and I had had a lot of hair as a baby; however, how much hair is too much?  Ryan is fair, but he does grow a good set of hair and a magnificent beard.  We wondered if we would have a wolf-child.

+=

Eek, we would have to create a fund for laser-hair removal instead of college!  Or, we could fully embrace the Persian-ness by dousing ourselves in perfume and keeping a hot pot of wax permanently on the stove.  (By the way, I do not wish to make fun of anyone suffering from Hypertrichosis, it is really an unfortunate disease.)

As a side note, the baby birthing classes were really big on "skin to skin" contact with your new baby and "wearing" the infant.  The baby reflexes of closing the fist and also curling the toes inward intrigued us; supposedly these reflexes are leftover from when we were primates and the baby needed to hold onto the mother.  Ryan decided that he would wear the baby on his chest, under his clothing.  The baby would grip his chest with her hands and feet just like an ape child.  Eventually, like Gollum, the baby would grow lean and lose all her hair.  A thin milky covering would coat her eyes and whenever Ryan would open his shirt, the baby would violently jump and hiss.

Back to hair.  I was more concerned that the baby would have no hair than that she would turn into a wolf-child.  Despite his head of hair, Ryan was pretty fair.  So that I wouldn't be disappointed, I decided that the baby probably wouldn't have any hair but that was okay because all of Ryan's nieces and nephews had still been adorable sans much hair.

Towards the end of the delivery, the nurses started talking but I really couldn't understand what they were saying so I looked at Ryan.  He looked and smiled and said that she had LOTS of hair.  I was so convinced that she would be bald that I was actually disappointed at first!  I blame it on the hormones and the fact that I was actually pushing a baby out right then.  It didn't take me long to fall in love with this baby's hair.

Newborn

One Month

Two Months

Three Months

Four Months

She will be five months in a few days and I can't get her hair to stick straight up anymore; it's so long that it just flops over.  If we skip giving her a bath, her hair stops smelling like baby and starts smelling like hair, it is getting too thick on top to use the baby brush and sometimes we don't get all the shampoo washed out, every day I have to work through some snarls in the back. Even though sometimes she looks like she's wearing a really bad toupee and maybe her hair is detracting from the cuteness, I love her hair!  As Willa gets older she looks more and more like Ryan except for her hair color, but in the beginning she was 100% me!  At the time, I felt kind of bad about that - I thought Ryan would feel a little left out.  Now, I love that she looked so much like me in the beginning; I feel like we have a special hair connection.

Almost Five Months

I tried to get a spikey-haired shot, but I couldn't pull it off.  Does someone have tips on how to do this?  I put hair gel in and it just ended up giving her the "wet hair" look, which is so 1992.