10 Things I Do Every Day for Amanda

I have 3 girls. My eldest, Jessica, is 14. My second daughter, Samantha, is almost 12. My youngest, Amanda, is 4. Jessica has hair like mine, brown, thick and wavy. Samantha is blond and has straight hair. Amanda is also blond and has lovely curly hair. I have a lot of fun taking pictures of Amanda’s hair.

I’ve already done a few posts about hair with cute photos of Amanda. They are listed here:

• Some Things Just Take Time
• Girls and Hair
• Knots in My Hair
• Blame It on the Fairies

So, I thought to do something a little different. What do I do as a mom of a 4-year-old?

10 Things I do every day for Amanda:

1. I dress her every morning. (She is able to put on some of her clothes without help.)

2. I brush her hair every morning and tie it up to keep it out of her face.

3. I have her wash her hands before meals and right after coming home from preschool.

4. I bath her every day, usually after preschool and just before her nap time. (Sometimes her sister, Samantha, does this for me when I can’t.)

5. Every afternoon I put her down for a nap. (Again, her sister sometimes does this for me.)

6. I make sure she drinks water even when she doesn’t feel like it (or juice mixed with water).

7. I make sure she eats balanced meals and treats are allowed, but in moderation.

8. I tell her how special she is and that I love her.

9. I brush her teeth every night before bed. (She can’t do it properly yet, so I do it for her to protect her baby teeth from cavities.)

10. Every night, before I go to bed, I pick my sleeping girl up and take her for one last pee. (If, on the rare occasion, I go to bed early, then her dad will do it.)

5 Things I do often for Amanda:

1. I wash her hair.

2. I cut her nails.

3. I read to her.

4. I do Pinterest with her. (This is a new hobby of hers and she even has her own board.)

5. I go shopping with her. (She loves going to the mall and the grocery store.)

Yesterday, Amanda wrote some of the letters of the alphabet on paper. She did such a neat job that I thought to scan her work and share it with you. The “A” is her favorite letter, because it’s the first letter in her name.

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Blame It on the Fairies!

Girly Comments & Graphics

Enjoy your weekend!

How does Shakespeare, fairies and knots in hair have anything to do with each other?

This is a follow-on from my previous post Knots in My Hair! 

Last year, while teaching Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare to my son’s high school class, I came across a funny mention to knots in the hair. It appears in the bizarre speech made by Mercutio. He blames the fairy, Queen Mab, for putting knots in dirty hair and that once combed out, the locks are unlucky.

After years of brushing Amanda’s hair, I wouldn’t say that the locks are unlucky, but that the children are who have to endure the combing of their hair!

Here’s the quote below:

"She [Queen Mab] is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone.......
That plaits the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes."

Wikipedia’s conclusion to this states, “Therefore, the appellation of elf lock or fairy lock could be attributed to any various tangles and knots of unknown origins appearing in the manes of beasts or hair of sleeping children.”

I also found this interesting quote on Wikipedia:

“When young children, especially girls, wake from an evening's slumber with tangles and snarls in their hair, mothers with a tradition of fairy folklore might whisper to their daughters that they had caught fairy locks or elf-locks. Faeries, they say, tangled and knotted the hairs of the sleeping children as they played in and out of their hair at night” (A Child’s Book of Faeries by Tanya Robyn Batt).

I’m so glad I’m from a modern era that understands the need to wash and that I can buy good shampoos and conditioners!

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Knots in My Hair!

Amanda is playing that the dolphins are diving

in the water at South Africa's West Coast.

The kids say the funniest things and I don’t always write it down. Sometimes, I say to myself that I’ll write it down later, but then I forget. I usually just let life happen, but I’ve found that writing it down allows me the time to enjoy the moment again and again.

The other day, I came across a little note of mine that had been buried under other papers near the computer. It was a funny moment that I had had with Amanda some months back and I had completely forgotten about it. Thank goodness that I had written it down on paper and not lost it! I’ve included a short introduction to help set the scene.


Every morning, I brush Amanda’s hair and tie it up out of her face. She has lots of curls that are sometimes hard to brush. Often, she complains that I’m hurting her. I try hard not to and I apologize when it pulls. If I don’t apologize, she gets upset with me.

On this particular morning she said the funniest thing. “You’re putting knots in my hair!”

“No, I’m not. I’m brushing the knots out,” I replied.

“You are putting knots in my hair. I feel it!”

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I thought to include a bit about how I edited these two photos. I edited both using PicMonkey, but I first straightened the one where Amanda is sitting with Picasa 3. I’ve included some links on these topics.

Related posts:

• Girls and Hair
• Kids with Animals – 8: How to Straighten a Photo in Picasa 3 
• Being Herself – 4: An Introduction to PicMonkey, a Free On-Line Photo Editing Program 
• Kids with Animals – 3: How to Edit a Photo Using PicMonkey 

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Girls and Hair

When Amanda was 1 and 2 years old, she had the curliest head of hair. Even if I washed it and dried it with a hairdryer and hairbrush, making it go straight, within 10 minutes the hair would bounce back into curls like little springs. I loved it. I was a little worried when it came time to her first haircut. I wasn’t sure if we would lose all those lovely curls. A friend, who used to be a hairdresser, came over and did our hair for us. Now, a few years later, Amanda still has curly hair, but it’s heavier than before, so it doesn’t curl as much as it did when she still had that baby-fine hair.






Back in middle school, I had a realization about girls and hair. Those who had curly hair envied girls with straight hair and girls with straight hair envied girls with curly hair. I decided back then that no matter what type of hair I had, I would be happy with it. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t try the crazy 80’s perm look.

Now I have 3 girls and they each have different hair. Samantha has the straightest hair out of all of us and she sometimes wishes she had Jessica’s wavy hair. Jessica, on the other hand, wanted and received a hair straightener for her last birthday. As you see, what I noticed about the female race while growing up is still true today.

You might like to read my blog post “Eye Color Conversation,” which discusses the topic of “How important is eye color to you?”

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