Choppity Chop Chop

The time has come, once again, for my dramatic post-partum haircut. Each time I've been pregnant, I've let my hair grow out because all those pregnancy hormones make it look especially full and nice and awesome. Then it gets even longer because after the baby is born I cannot easily go get a haircut, however much I might like to. Then all those hormones go away and sometime around 2-3 months my hair starts shedding LIKE MAD. Seriously, SO MUCH HAIR coming out-- a) it grosses me out and b) my hair starts to look kind of stringy and limp. Then, finally, I reach the point of being able to stand it no longer and go have it chopped all off:





Yay! I feel like a NEW WOMAN. This may have been the most dramatic haircut ever for me; she cut off about 5" of hair. I've found a stylist here that I like quite well who does mostly curly hair. I will admit that I liked the guy I went to in Dallas a bit better as he was some kind of curly-hair genius (hey look! something I like better about Dallas than Salt Lake City!) but this girl here is great too. And oh, how much happier I am when my hair has a specific style that looks like it was done on purpose... (I've mentioned before how I feel about too long hair or hair that has been arrived at by default.) It's still shedding like you wouldn't believe but at least there is less of it now and it looks better.

At around the same time when I chopped my hair, we attempted to go chop ourselves a Christmas tree. We decided to try one more time after last year's less-than-stellar results. We drove to a different Christmas tree farm than last time, although also about an hour away, and tromped around trying to see what we could find.





It was EVEN WORSE than last year, partly because it was so picked over (this was the weekend after the weekend after Thanksgiving) and partly because, well, I guess Utah does not grow the prettiest trees, in the style of the Pacific Northwest. It was so bad (and so freezing cold that day), in fact, that we left without one and drove the hour back to the city. We needed a few things at Costco so we stopped there. And look!



Costco had Christmas trees! "Fine," we sighed slightly defeatedly, and bought one. My photographic record of our Christmas tree journey ends here, but it was still DAYS until we had it up and decorated. We got the tree home and realized that our Christmas tree stand (which is this special swivel-y kind that we like a lot) broke last year and we had forgotten to order a new one. Rob ordered a new one and in the meantime we put the tree in a bucket of water in the garage. Then we proceeded to have a super cold snap with highs in 20s and the tree and its water froze. The first day I could still poke my finger through the ice in the tree's bucket, but by the next day the layer of ice was a good inch thick. By this time the weekend was over and all the rest of our tree efforts had to take place after Rob was home from work, i.e. in the pitch black darkness of December evenings at 41º N latitude.

Our stand arrived once our tree was good and frozen and that evening we managed to get the tree inside, after power saws were used in the dark and so forth. It was so frozen that when we unwrapped the twine holding the branches up, the branches just stayed that way. Over the course of the next hour it slowly defrosted and the branches dropped into a more Christmas-y arrangement. You could hear it if you put your ear next to the tree, these tiny pinging icy sounds. Also, it dropped an unseemly amount of needles, maybe because of being frozen? Or because Costco didn't have one of those shake-y machines that they have at Lowes or Home Depot? The next night we got the lights on, and the night after that, FINALLY, almost a week after we went to cut down a tree, it was finished and decorated. What an ordeal! I have never really seen the appeal of a pre-lit artificial tree but this year? This year I get it.