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Posted by Sabrina Weill, August 4, 2009

The only princess movie scenes that make me a little jealous are the ones when the princess looks at herself approvingly in the mirror while dancing a hairbrush ever-so-smoothly and effortlessly through her cascading tresses. As if to rub it in, the princess often sings merrily while brushing away: "la la la la LAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!"  

At our house, it's not really like that. When our Little Princess started her love of princesses, she had just-above-the-shoulder length hair. "I need to grow my hair much, much longer," she declared. And so she did. A few months later, we were about to visit relatives so I took her for a cut and they took off about 2 inches. My daughter came home, looked in the mirror, gasped and then literally swooned and sobbed with grief and misery.

When it was time for another cut, I decided maybe I wouldn't go to the cheap-cuts place again (bad listeners there!). I checked with a few grown-up salons that expected $50 for a child's trim. I was stuck: too nervous to go the cheap place, too frugal to bring her to a pricey place. I simply haven't dared to cut it for a long, long time.

So now it is long. Really long. She has the longest hair in all the land. And running a brush through it takes bristles, and nerves, of steel. I've tried detanglers, conditioners and just plain letting it go all birds-nest style. I dread those five long minutes of brushing and shrieking each morning. Then one day last week, I had a new and exciting thought. I pulled the step-stool up to the sink so LP could see herself in the mirror, and handed her the brush.

"You do it." She said, reflexively. I sprayed in the detangler, and waited. She looked in the mirror at an intimidating mass of curls and tangles. And then...  she started... brushing. And brushing, and brushing. And even when the brush made that zip-zip sound of knots coming out, she didn't jerk away or whine about it.

At the end, her hair did not look perfect. There were plenty of knots in the back and she missed a few very obvious swipes on one side. I handed her a sparkly pink headband and she slipped it on, tipping it too far forward so her ears poked out a bit. She looked at me, eyebrows up, wanting to know if I approved.

No question, there was only right answer: "It's perfect! You look like a princess."

Sabrina Weill is the founder of the pink and princess-y gift site PrincessLovesPink.com.