Welcome Back Fro

It’s finally done. I loved my weave/braid combo but by the 4th week, I was officially missing Fro. I decided to push it at least for one more week and I’m actually quite proud of myself that I made it this far. Yes, the original plan was to keep it in for 6 weeks, but hey one week shy isn’t too bad, plus the hair was beginning to thin and I’ve always hated waiting until a style’s looking shabby before removing it. I knew the right time to do it was on Saturday, after gym so I put aside a couple of hours to do so.

Well, more than four hours and a headache later, I finally got the extensions out! Sigh, it was one of those rare moments that I cursed being a black woman. Anyways, I washed and DC’d my hair and made sure Fro got its well deserved gulp of water. I undid the cornrows this morning. While Fro was away, I added a couple more members to my product junkie stash. I’m currently testing Sof’n’Free’s girls’ line which claims to have no mineral oil, petrolatum or other dodgy ingredients. I got them a couple weeks ago and couldn’t wait to try them. Both lotions, I got them to fill a gap I had in my products list because my homemade Zesty Lemon Butter (although great) is too thick to spread all over my hair to ‘wet’ it and I figured I could try something creamier to get my hair into certain styles. So, I have nothing to lose. I’ll do a product review of that sometime.

Anywho, this is me and Fro:

She’d been so good throughout all my photos, I thought she should finally make a cameo.

I’d been dying to measure my hair as I hadn’t actually done it in awhile. I’d realised that if my goal this year is to retain length, I should have some kind of record of how long it’s growing. So after undoing, washing etc., I noticed that there were some stray hairs all over the place. The last time I trimmed my hair was about 6 months ago so I was definitely due for some polishing. When braiding my mabutu for the evening, I snipped a little bit of the scraggly ends. I couldn’t wait until the next time I go to the salon like I’d planned.

Anywho, my hair at the moment is 8 inches long. Taking into consideration that I’d only trimmed my hair once since going natural, and that in the first 8 months or so my hair was growing at a rate of .5″ a month, it either means my growth has slowed down or that my hair’s been breaking thus affecting my length. The latter sounds more realistic. If breakage and trimming didn’t occur, I’d expected my hair to be almost 12 inches by now. So it’s a good thing I know now what my length starting point is this year so I can check it every once in awhile. It’s also a good thing that I decided to protective style most of this year as that will hopefully help with any breakage. This is the week I give Fro a break and rest before getting onto our mission. We’ve got a lot of work to do this year!