Vanity, thy hair is orange

Perhaps my problem started back in June when I started spring-cleaning our house: organizing, repacking, cloroxing--in short, nesting in preparation for our coming baby. In a somewhat frenzied attempt to get us ready for the move to Heber before the baby came, I packed all my pre-maternity clothes into a huge plastic bin and labeled it with an oversized black marker: "Skinny Clothes." I think I wrote it to tease my husband into a smile, but I now blame it for my full head of orange hair. It's the bin labeled skinny clothes--and the fact that I still have no reason to pull that blasted bin out of the basement--that led me, as I walked down the baby aisle in the grocery store looking for rice cereal, to the hair dye. Being a marketer, I've realized that the hair dye is strategically placed to tempt desperate new mothers into doing "a little something" as an overall pick-me-up.

I resisted last Thursday and succumbed on Friday--much to my current chagrin and my sister Amy's much (loud) laughter. (Isn't there something in the scriptures about loud laughter?) I would have cried, but there's really no point. In fact, it's really quite laughable (especially the fact that Eric and I were going out with some of his friends for dinner that night). Amy's husband James suggested sporting a Sinead O'Connor look, Amy herself suggested a wig, I thought about a baseball cap. But the long and short of it is that the orange hair made me laugh, pushed me out of my too-frequent stops by the mirror, and made me remember why the Lord counseled us to be aware of vanity. So to dinner I went in all my glory. Eric said it doesn't look that bad, and although orange it remains, it's toning down a bit.