When I pick up my daughter from camp at the end of the day she barely resembles the child I said goodbye to in the morning. The morning child has its hair combed, face and hands washed and is wearing clean, albeit it stained, clothes. The afternoon child has tangled, matted hair, and a face covered with dirt, paint, and food. The clothes of the afternoon child are smothered with dirt, wood chips, and grass, and splattered with paint and clay.
These are the excellent clothes of a six-year old at mid-summer.
The condition of what she’s wearing offers me concrete indicators of how she spent her day. I get clues about what she did, where she went, etc. and I learn more from what her clothes than from what she remembers to tell me.
One day, a few weeks ago, she came home with sparkles all over her. Earlier that afternoon she had decorated her clay sculpture and she’d gotten sparkles on her clothes, face, and hair. I noticed, after a few days, that the sparkles were still in her hair. An extra vigorous shampoo succeeded in getting out most of them but a few were still there. A few days later I did another vigorous shampoo, with more scrubbing, but several sparkles still remained. They appeared to be glued to her skull. It is now 4 weeks later and the sparkles are still there. About 10 of them are on her head; you can see them if you look from the top down.
Should I scrub harder? Is there a special shampoo for getting out sparkles? Am I a bad mother for not being more worried about this?
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