Missy Diggs

If  you live in Austin, Texas you don’t need me to tell you how hot it is today. And if you live anywhere else, you probably think you’re hot and you don’t want to hear from those of us who really ARE hot. But I live in Austin, Texas, and I’m hot, and it’s practically all I can talk about.

Or, at least, that would have been true yesterday, or the day before, or any day last week, if I had had time to update my blog. But I didn’t have time to do that, because all of those days were during the summer, and the Vivid Girl and I were locked together almost all the time, and even when we weren’t physically together, I may have been busy buying her snacks or whatever.

But –even though I live in Austin and it is seventy-million degrees out and will continue to be like that until Halloween or Thanksgiving or whatever– summer is officially over for me. Because today the Vivid Girl went back to school.

The Vivid Girl has been wishing for summer to end and for school to start since approximately forty-five minutes after school ended and summer started. You would feel this way, too, if you went to her school. Imagine what you wished school could be like as a child. I mean, really: imagine being able to spend hours making up dance routines with your two best friends and then performing them every afternoon for the other kids. Or imagine having access to hammers, and nails, and paint, and wood, and a closet full of recyclable materials, and a teacher who knows how to help you make exactly what you want to make, whether it’s a toy gun or a house for your imaginary pet. Imagine teachers who will pretend to be animals, not just for five minutes here or there but all day every day for months. Imagine that you could play outside for hours and hours in the mud and sand and sun while your peers were stuck inside sitting at desks, filling out worksheets, taking tests, and waiting for their twenty minutes of recess. And what if you were actually learning to read, write, sing, make art, make friends, do math, and study science all the same time?

Now imagine you could do it all barefoot, and you’ve pretty much got the Vivid Girl’s school.

So, when school has all that going for it, it’s maybe easy to see why spending summer hanging around the house with mom is just not that much fun. Even if we do buy sno cones five days in a row and go swimming three times a week and see friends who for some unfortunate reason don’t go to this school.

So no one could have been more jazzed about the first day of school than the Vivid Girl. Except maybe me, her mother. Because if there is anything worse than being a fretful, bored, lonely, disregulated six-and-a-half-year-old, it’s being her stay-at-home mom.

So now the Vivid Girl is safely tucked away at school, and I finally have some time to myself. Time to get organized, time to write, time to figure out what I want to do with my life anyway. Time to swim laps, which I did this morning for the first time since high school. Time to go back to Zumba, now that I’m pretty much recovered from my car crash. Time for actual grown-up conversations with friends, without being interrupted by a jealous giant with sticky hands and a shrieking cry for attention. Time to listen to the music I like. Time to just sit and do nothing but watch one thought follow the next in an unbroken chain.

But right now? It’s time to go pick up a frozen treat to have ready for the Vivid Girl when she gets in the car after her first day of first grade. Because she’s been playing outside all day. And it is HOT out there, y’all.

Shampoo is probably not the first thing you think of when you hear the word “revolution,” but there is a small —but growing!— movement of people who are giving up shampoo and other hair products for good.

This trend is called “going no ‘poo,” and if you do an Internet search on that phrase you will probably be surprised by how many hits you get, and how many of them are from the last six months or so. I’m telling you, this wave is rising!

I first heard of the concept after my daughter was born, when I was spending a lot of time lurking on the Mothering.com forums. Lots of natural living mamas over there, for sure. I was tempted to try it out myself but in the fog of caring for an infant I think I just forgot about it.

Then, last year, I heard there was a lot of talk about it on the message board for one of the crunchier local parenting groups. Since then, whenever I run into someone I know from that group, I always wonder whether they are using shampoo or not. Usually the kids are pulling us in all directions and I don’t get a chance to ask. But I have my theories.

Right now, after 8 months of chemotherapy, with my new hair about half an inch long and growing, seems like the perfect time to give it a try. Not only because this is the closest I will ever come to starting over with all-new hair (I hope!) but also because now that I have cancer I am even more uncomfortable with some of the ingredients in the “self-care” products we use every day. I know there are usually more natural versions of the products available, for a price, but many of those contain suspicious ingredients too (for example, a “food-grade paraben” listed in a “natural” product is still a paraben; I don’t care if the FDA says it’s okay to eat it). And paying a higher price for a product I actually don’t need doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me anyway.

And the people who promote going no ‘poo claim that their hair looks better now than it did when they used products to clean and condition it. Supposedly, the shampoo strips your hair and scalp of natural oils and even bacteria that would otherwise be helping your hair look shiny and full. When those oils are stripped away, your skin produces extra oil to compensate. Then your hair looks greasy and feels dirty and you need to wash it with shampoo again. Conditioner weighs your hair down and keeps it from looking as full and shiny as it would if you had left it alone in the first place.

So they say.

Also, many of the things I’ve read say that there is a transitional period during which your hair will not look awesome, as your body adjusts to the job of taking care of itself naturally. Well, sure, with any new job, there’s a learning curve, I guess. During this period, and possibly beyond, some people like to “wash” their hair with a mixture of baking soda and water, rinse, and then “condition” their hair with apple cider vinegar. Otherwise, people just wash by running warm water through their hair, letting it dry, and brushing it to distribute the natural oils from the roots throughout their hair.

And so I think I will try it. If I’m going to go through a period where my hair does not look awesome, it might as well be now, when my hair’s too short for anyone to be able to tell. When I think of the money I could save by forgoing hair products for the rest of my life, I get pretty excited about what else I could be spending that money on…. like new lipsticks! Or, well, I’ll guess I’ll figure that one out later.

Speaking of worms, what about spiders? This headline caught my eye today, so I offer this tidbit for your edification:

A new species of spider has been named after Neil Young.

And that’s all I have time to tell you today.