"You know I like my chicken fried"

I am a southern girl - therefore, I like anything fried.

My mom and sister made an impromptu trip to Durham this weekend.  They decided on Thursday night to come up and we had a lot of fun.  We ate all kinds of junk food, watched the Olympics, and just had lots of girl time...and Ryan got to catch up on video games with the boys at  Matt & Wes'.  That made two weekends in a row that we got to enjoy family in town, lots of junk food, Olympics, etc... because Ryan's parents came up last weekend and we had a lot of fun with them here as well.

Anyways, back to my love for all things fried.  Mmmm...we even made home-made french fries on Saturday night.  I do love anything fried. 

What I don't love, however, is my hair fried.  And that is also something that happened this weekend...

I wish I had a picture for you, but all of the pictures...and videos...are on my sister's camera (and she left this afternoon) and my camera battery is currently dead, so those pics will just have to wait, but...

back to my hair.

So, this whole newlywed thing has put Ryan and I on a tight budget and it's just painful to shell out $150 for a cut and color, so I let my mom put her cosmetology license to good use last summer and foil and cut my hair.  Granted, she had gotten her cosmetology license 25 years ago and never did hair other than cutting ours as kids, but oh well.  She talked to our hair lady, Carolyn, (who's awesome by the way...she did my hair for my wedding) who gave her all the info on what exact color she uses on my hair and how she divides up the sections and foils at certain angles, etc, basically the run down so mom could do it herself.  So upon arriving home to GA late on a Friday night last May (yes, May...that was the last time my hair has been touched by color or scissors...horrible, I know!), my mom and I stayed up til the wee hours of the morning with her slowly and carefully foiling my hair.  And...it turned out awesome!  Looked just as good as it does when I pay sweet Carolyn $150 to do it, so I was super excited to know that from now on, mom can just do my touch-ups and I can put that $150 towards groceries or something more "essential" than hair.  She also cut it and layered it really well too. 

So, here's how my hair turned out - this is a picture from the very next day, a random one, but the only one I have from that trip home with my fresh cut and color that shows my hair.  My niece Abigail is the sweet baby girl I'm holding, who was quite miserable in this little mandatory life-vest by the way...

So, since it's now been 10 months since my last touch-up and my mom and sister came up for the weekend, I had them bring all the hair stuff so we could do my hair while they were here.  My mom did it by herself last time, but my sister has been working at Carolyn's shop some lately trying to learn the ins-and-outs of hair and is planning to attend the Paul Mitchell school either this fall or after going to college first (major life decision still to be determined) to ultimately do hair.  So she's observed Carolyn doing lots of foils lately, so this would be a fun little experiment. 

So, they attacked my hair yesterday.  I sat down in front of the movie "Into the Blue" and they went to foiling my head for the next two hours.  Jamie finished up the last row of foils on the top left side of my head and then sent me under the "heater".  So after about 5 minutes under the heater, the left side of my head started to burn.  I don't know if it was that the foil got hot and was hurting me or if the chemicals had gotten on my head or what.  Jamie came to check my hair when I started to yelp and looked slightly alarmed as she said "uhhh....i think it's blond enough.  let's get these off".  That's weird though because normally I'm under the heater for longer than that, but whatever they say.  They seemed a little worried that it might be a little too blond.  I was thinking oh well, at least spring is around the corner... lol.

So, mom takes a peek and confirms that we should get these foils off, that somehow my hair looks a little "too" blond.  So we all go to town picking foil off my head into the sink and then starts Jamie's nervous laughter, followed by looks of panic on my mom's face.  I couldn't see what they were seeing, but I knew something wasn't quite right. 

As they rinsed the product from my hair, Jamie could hardly contain her nervous laughter...or hysterics by this point and my mom just put her head in her hands on the counter.  All I could do was laugh with Jamie and wait to see what had happened. 

It turns out my hair is now a bright shade of yellow/orange in some places, really blond in others, and still kinda dark with little blond streaks in yet other places.

Think Vienna from the Bachelor - that shade of bleach yellow blond.  That's me now, except it's not all over my head, just concentrated in a very thick mohawk like stripe slightly off-centered to the left going down my head.  Another thing...since they didn't color down the entire strands of hair, just covered the roots, the color is concentrated on the top half of my hair and maintained its natural blond looking on the bottom half. It's a mess.

My poor mother just looked sick.  She just kept saying, "What will we do when Ryan comes back?  What will he say when he sees what we've done to your hair?".  My poor mother.  Then ensued the "I think that was your section" banter back and forth between them, haha! Although I will say...I'm pretty sure it was Jamie's section.  I think I'll wait until she actually GOES to Paul Mitchell school before I let her touch my hair again. 

I went ahead and washed it and started to dry it to see if that helped.  But that aforementioned yellow/orange section right in the front of my hair started to get all tangly and knotted under the heat.  So I stopped and ran a brush through it...to find that my hair was breaking off in sizzled pieces.  That's when I finally started to get a tad bit nervous.  I'm ok with crazy colored hair for a day until I can get a professional to fix it, but FRIED HAIR??!?!?!  I've always had healthy hair...my hair has never been DAMAGED! So I decided to let it air dry. (and I will say that after it dried, it smoothed out and I don't think that it is damaged at all.)

About that time, Ryan and Matt walked in...and their mouths fell slightly open and their eyes slightly bulged at the sight of me.  And then they just referred to me as "the floozy from the street" for the rest of the weekend.  Anyways...it was at that point that my poor mom's hand just went to her mouth and she had to walk out of the room.  Bless her heart.  It's just hair. It can be fixed.  But you could just see the guilt on her face - I should have prefaced this whole story by telling you that Mom is not crazy about doing my hair because she doesn't do hair (the May experience had been her first ever attempt at coloring with foil) and is scared of being responsible if it ever turned out not how I wanted it, but I had talked her into doing it. 

Anyways, lucky for me, salon's are closed on Sunday and Monday, so I did go to church with my hair lookin' like a floozy this morning and I will have to sit through my department meeting tomorrow before I can get my color, uh...."adjusted". 

Also lucky for me though, my personal stylist happened to be on hand this morning.  Jamie just manipulated my hair into a funky little style to hide the skunk-like stripe as much as she could  and I'll just have to do my best to imitate the 'do for work tomorrow I guess.    

I really think the whole thing is funny.  I mean I was never the rebel that would put a bold yellow stripe in my hair, so we'll just call this my "rebel yellow streak" hair-dying phase. :)  I'm just getting it out of my system.  My poor mom feels so bad about the whole thing and she will read this, so Mom, just know that I wrote about this because of how funny the incident was and that I am not worried about my hair. It will look fine on Tuesday! :)