Pregnancy hair

Advice in the first 12 weeks from websites, magazines and books all encourage pregnant women to look forward to the second trimester.  A supposedly magical time when the fatigue fades, you grow but glow and you develop that lovely pregnancy head of hair.  Pantene has nothing on it.  Hormones mean that it is thicker, glossier and just better. 

I got that.  It is thicker and it would probably be shiny if I could be bothered to wash it more often.  But I can't as truthfully I am far less happy about it than the literature claims I should be.  I have stopped dying it, after deciding that it was best not to take chances, especially with something so vain and periphery to my ultimate happiness.  At least that was the noble, just-found-out-I'm-pregnant-me.  Before the reality of 5 inches of roots, in a colour I assume is my natural shade.  I can't recall, as the last time I saw it I must have been 10 years old.  Being an all-or-nothing sort, I've been letting my undyed locks go almost all-natural.  No straightening.  The natural waves sometimes being a friend and sometimes being a cantankerous distant cousin of dreadlocks.

This past Saturday, me and my nature-mama hair rolled our of bed and threw on a bathrobe.  A lazy morning ahead of me, I didn't pay a thought to the tangled afro on my head.  Thom and I pottered about on the decking in the morning sunlight, he sipping coffee while I inspected the plants.  I pulled out some offensive bind weed and returned inside to the sofa, content that I had been an instustrious little morning person.  

Half way through the morning talk shows, I started paying attention to the tangles, half-mindedly easing them apart with my fingers.  As a worked through the mess, eyes glazed and fixed on the television, I was startled to find something hard and cold among the knotted tresses.  It even felt a little wet.  My fingers brushed past it at first and I struggled to back track and locate it again.   

Was it a pebble? A bit of last nights dinner?  Some strange skin problem?  I was more horrified than all of that to pull it out and see it was a tiny baby snail shell.  Disgusted, I let it fall from my fingers to the bathrobe.  Thom thought it was cute.  After landing, I was even more shocked to see a tiny baby snail timidly raise it's antennae out of the shell and start to explore my lap.  Thom quickly saved me, or perhaps saved himself from my protests of 'Eww!' and 'Gross!'.  He released the little guy outside. 

So, pregnancy hair.  One of the highlights of this experience and also a handy net for catching garden pests.