The Baby Fro

Abraham has some ah-mazing hair.  He was born with a full head of it, and it's been part of his look ever since.

We regularly get comments and questions about it.  And I don't blame anyone, it's pretty fun to see a little baby with so.much.hair.

My White friends often ask if it's hard to do (and Black strangers have been known to ask me if I know what I'm doing with it), and the answer is it's really not hard and yes, I know what I'm doing with it.  I actually find Abraham's hair to be easier to care for that the girls' super thin, fine hair.  Abraham's hair can hold up to product and is easy to make look cute, whereas the girls' hair has a mind of it's own and doesn't want to stay how I do it.

At birth, his hair was very straight and soft (as you can see above) and required little to no care at all.  We washed it weekly and added just a touch of coconut oil before it dried to help seal in moisture.  Every month his hair slowly changed texture.

You can see here at a few months old that his hair is still the same soft texture, but has started to develop curl.  At this point, I switched from washing it regularly with shampoo, to washing it mostly with just conditioner and only using shampoo once ever 3 weeks or so.  It's a technique known as co-washing and is really adequate to get the hair clean without stripping it of oils.  I would still put a coat of coconut oil on the hair while it was still wet after washing to seal in moisture.  I started needing to spray it down with water and adding oil again a couple times a week at this point as well.

In the last month his hair has been changing texture again.  The hair coming in at the scalp is in much tighter curls and has a slightly courser texture.  The soft baby hair is still on top of that though, so our routine is changing again.

He gets his hair washed with conditioner once a week.  While it's full of conditioner, I detangle it because it is starting to get matted up if this isn't done regularly.  I use Aubrey Organics conditioner as I like the nice thick texture of it and the fact that it's free of any stripping ingredients like sulfates.  When I do use shampoo, I use Beautiful Curls - Babies and Up line.  When he gets out of the tub I use the Beautiful Curls Nourishing Curl Oil to seal in moisture.

On non-bath days, I thoroughly wet down his hair and add Beautiful Curls Leave-in Detangler.  If you just use water, it's really fuzzy and gets matted again within a few hours.  The detangler is really light and seems to be just enough right now to keep the curls in check.

We also let little man sleep in the lap of luxury.  He has satin crib sheets.  I know.  Fancy.  But natural fibers like cotton pull moisture out of your hair and the texture roughs up his curls, so satin it is.

And that's it!  It's really not that hard, and on days when we are just staying home I often don't do a thing with his hair.  Here's what it looks like when we go that route:

Some day the back will fill back in!

It's so adorable that everyone loves to rub his curls.  Now that the texture is changing though, I'm going to have to start asking people (and telling myself) to keep hands off as it dries his hair out to rub it and it messes up those curls.

It's normal in Black culture to give your little boys a short buzzed haircut around their first birthday, but I just don't know if I can do it!  I love the curls.  The plan for now is to keep them and see how it goes.  I'm going to try my hand and cornrows when he has enough hair.  If it gets to be more work than I'm up for I will probably cut it, but for now his curls are just such a part of his look I can't imagine him without them.