During the winter here in Minnesota I keep a big jar of Vaseline (a.k.a. petroleum jelly) in the mudroom, for slathering on the children’s faces before we go out in the cold. Works great to keep the chapped lips, noses, and cheeks to a minimum.
Well, it’s warming up around here, and I started to clean out the mud room: put the coats in the washing machine, cleaned the mud off the winter boots, etc., replaced the heavy things with light jackets, things like that. And I took the big jar of Vaseline and set it on the end of the kitchen counter, intending to take it upstairs the next time I went up, and then I went to surf the web for a while.
You know where this is going, don’t you?
MJ was reeeeeeallly quiet for a while, and when I got up to check on her she had fetched a spoon, climbed up to the kitchen counter, and troweled the Vaseline thickly onto her face, arms, and hair.
I provide the following sentence fragment for the benefit of Googling moms everywhere: How to get Vaseline out of hair. The answer is cornstarch. (Which I found by Googling also, a couple of days later, after I’d shampooed her hair about six times with Suave Kids 2-in-1 shampoo and it still looked really greasy. The results were about evenly divided between cornstarch advocates and peanut butter advocates.)
I put MJ in the empty bathtub and worked several big pinches of cornstarch into her short blond hair, probably about half a cup of cornstarch, until every bit of her hair felt powdery and soft and thick with it. Then I put her in the shower (she started to sniffle — she hates having her hair washed — but she went willingly), rinsed it, shampooed it twice with my own non-2-in-1 shampoo on the theory that it might work better to remove oil, and followed it with conditioner. It dried overnight and now it looks almost normal.
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