This darn shedding!

I have fallen off of my projected straightening schedule ALREADY....but for good reason. The blowout that I got last month took me well through the end of October, just like I expected. It wasn't difficult at all -- my regimen was super simple, being that most days I wore my hair in some sort of bun (high bun, donut bun, braided bun), updo (usually with a claw clip or good hair day pin), or braidout and I only moisturized maybe 2 times a week to avoid buildup from too much coconut or avocado oil. The hard part actually came from what should have been a simple step in my regimen: washing my hair. I rarely combed my hair all the way through from root to tip when it was straight, opting to finger comb or brush only the edges when needed. Therefore, I completely forgot about the crazy seasonal shedding I get in the fall.

The day that I washed my hair, I stepped in the shower with a large comb, a few clips, and my shampoo, but came out with a few huge hair balls! Of course I panicked, but luckily I have been taking great care to track not only my growth, but also my shedding and breakage amounts -- not to the point where i am doing obsessive things like counting strands and examining every piece of hair for that little white bulb (okay, maybe just every OTHER strand, lol), but I do know what is normal versus abnormal for me. I first noticed in the fall of 2008 as a new natural that something wasn't quite right with my hair....I remember not combing a WNG for about a week and being horrified to discover on wash day that my hair was matted. I did learn quickly that once-a-week detangling was not going to be an option if I was wearing WNGs, but I also learned that the amount of hair I shedded that week was what caused the matting. Even after starting to PS, I was still getting these huge hairballs, and all the troubleshooting in the world didn't fix it. I calmly waited it out, and noticed around December that things were back to normal. The same thing happened last fall, despite the fact that I was PSing a lot more, and no matter how many garlic treatments I did or pills I popped, it didn't stop until it was ready to. This year being the third year, I have now realized that it's just a seasonal thing that I can't really do anything about. I did do a few protein treatments to a) restore my hair from the heat use and b) ward against any possible breakage there could have been, but even with all that Megatek, I am still pulling back tons of shed hairs every time I touch my hair.

The only plan of attack I have is to keep doing what I have been doing: wearing my hair in protective styles and keeping up with a strict moisture regimen. I cornrowed the sides of my hair last Sunday to make a semi-frohawk and wore my loose hair in a variation of sponge roller curls, french braids, braidouts and braidout buns this week, making sure to wet, moisturize and finger comb my hair each night before resetting. Tomorrow I will take down the cornrows, prepoo with coconut oil, shampoo my hair, DC with matrix biolage conditioning balm and add the kimmaytube leave-in with a few sprays of aphogee green tea + keratin. Not quite sure how I will style it yet, but I am kinda liking the combo of cornrows and french braids, so that may win out. I will try straightening again in December, since I hope the shedding will have stopped by then.