Reporting live from Baby Jail! It’s kind of like irish handcuffs, only with a baby instead of two pints of Guinness.

Molly is a sweet little darling dolly Mollywog. I call her Molly Mo-mo-mo-mo-mo, and sometimes Doodle and sometimes Cricket. She smiles easily and — AND! I forget to tell you! — she has slept through the night three days in a row this week. She must really love me.

She is, however, not without her flaws, as tiny and imperceptible as they may be. She has two faults, one for each end. Her first fault is that she has a tendency to overeat if we’re not paying attention, which means that when we least expect it there’s a firehose of vomit shooting out of our dear sweet seven-week-old. It’s rather shocking. Nearly as shocking as the sensation of having someone else’s vomit trickling into your underpants. Her other fault — some would call it a skill — is the striking ability to eject poo from her (adorable! chubby!) bottom, out her diaper, straight up her back and into her hair. I’m sure there’s a circus somewhere in need of a sideshow infant, right?

In return for a solid 6-8 hour stretch of sleep, Molly Dolly Pollywog requires much holding and cooing and jiggling and feeding between the hours of, oh, 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. which, when you’re the mother of two other tiny tots, is basically the only prime blogging time, and despite the iPhone I still can’t manage to write at length with one hand. I can surf, but I can’t write. So instead of writing to you dear lovelies I have been lurking on assorted websites, the top three being:

1. apartment therapy (I’m doing a casual version of their 20/20 cure)
2. my exclusive mom forum where my bitches be at
3. naturallycurly.com

That third link? Yes, it’s an entire forum devoted to obsessing over one’s hair. And I’m obsessed with their obsessing. These members are not just deconstructing bad hair days, they’re de facto scientists, running trials and comparing results. They have opinions about, for example, behentrimonium methosulfate. That is hardcore.

A popular tenet on the site is the concept promoted in a book called Curly Girl, which advises a person with curly hair to stop using shampoo and only wash with (a particular kind of) conditioner. They call it CG, or No-Poo, for no shampoo. This is done because (it is said) the harsh detergents in regular shampoo strip the hair of valuable oils, making it dry, frizzy, and unmanageable. Basically, making it look like this:

With the right conditioner instead of a shampoo wash, you can turn that into this:

Or so it goes.

I mentioned all this No Poo business briefly in a blog post a year ago about my “hair experiment.” It worked pretty well for a little while, but not forever. I finally gave it up and have been shampooing since, though I’m not in love with how it looks now.

Yesterday I finally escaped Baby Jail for a desperately needed haircut, and last night I decided to try going No-Poo once more. Once Molly was asleep in her daddy’s arms, I jumped in the shower. As I’m standing there, applying my leave-in conditioner, Iain bursts into the bathroom. He is carrying Molly. And Molly has just recently practiced her sideshow skill.

My No-Poo? No match for her Poo-Poo.