bad hair week

It's been a bad hair week for T and her friend, G.
On Sunday night, they played hairdresser and managed to emerge from the closet "salon" with about half a jar of Vaseline smeared into their hair.

Where were these children's parents? Well, let's just say that three of them were having what they thought was a quiet, relaxing, grown-up dinner, and the other was romping around Italy, single-guy style. That'll teach them. Because getting Vaseline out of hair, especially fine children's hair is seriously tricky business. So tricky, in fact, that when you search on "how to get vaseline out of hair" on msn, you get 74,158 results.

And frankly, most of them are bad.

The first site we looked at said that most any shampoo will get Vaseline out of hair. We were doubtful, but put the two littlest girls (and worst victims), T and G, into the tub and started scrubbing with baby shampoo (we were so naive then). Of course, it did nothing. We tried dish detergent for something a bit stronger, since you know, if it could cut chicken fat, it should be able to cut though Vaseline.

Nope. In fact, we learned from the next site that by putting water on the Vaseline, we'd made the removal process even more difficult.

Another site swore that patting cornstarch onto every affected area of the hair (in our case, the whole head) would be 99% effective (or at least 97%) because the Vaseline would bind to the cornstarch and then remove easily when washed out. This was extremely messy, but the messiness seemed encouraging, as if something so hard just could not fail.

It helped, but was definitely not 99% effective, or even 97%. Maybe 30%.

I took my exhausted, overwashed, yet still very greasy girl home. She fell asleep in the car so I just put her in bed and when she woke up, her pillow was stained with Vaseline grease. Ick.

The next day, recharged with a mission, I got online again. I learned some more interesting facts about Vaseline and hair. First of all, Vaseline is apparently an effective method of ridding oneself of lice and I could feel good that my child would surely be nit free. However, the next posting on this topic stated a serious warning in ALL CAPS. It said something like:

DID YOU KNOW THAT VASELINE IS A PETROLEUM PRODUCT AND BY PUTTING IT ON YOUR CHILD'S HEAD, YOU ARE ESSENTIALLY MAKING IT VERY FLAMABLE?

All day I fought off the urge to call daycare and warn them to keep T away from flames.

That evening, F (G's mom) called me with the cure. Cornstarch on a dry head and then add Neutrogena Anti-Residue shampoo, leave on for 30 minutes and voila!

It was close. I did it twice and at least T's head didn't leave stains anymore after brushing against things. I'd give it a good 85% effective.

So four days later we're still greasy enough to be able to mold her braids Pippi Longstocking-style, but getting closer. T has endured about 8 hours of hair washing so far this week (not the most fave activity of this particular two-year old) and I can pretty much feel very comfortable that the next time she sees an open jar of Vaseline, she'll stay very far away.

And luckily, it wasn't scissors.