Accepting your natural hair can be the first step toward self-love. Below are a few self-love graphic quotes that I made. These graphics and more are available at iheartgifs.blogspot.com.

I’m running behind on how-to videos and web updates!  My son has had four soccer games this week and I’m suffering from a clogged ear!  Anyone know any remedies?  My ear has been like this for over a week now.  I thought it was wax or something, but now I think there may be built up pressure.  Help!

Anyway, I like posting interesting links when I run across them. This one was sent to me by a friend through email.  It’s the trailer to a film called “Desert Flower” which is, “An adaptation of Waris Dirie’s bestselling autobiography, the story recounts Dirie’s rise from childhood in the Somali desert to the catwalks of the international fashion business” (source). You can read a description of the film on the website: http://www.diretube.com/liya-kebede-new-movie/desert-flower-full-trailer-hd-video_f429c2837.html and check out the trailer below:

I don’t think this film is playing in my area, but maybe it’ll be available near some of you. I’ll be looking for it on Netflix if I can’t see it at theaters.

Please forgive me today.  I’ve had a long exhausting day of home schooling.  I have hair videos that I should be editing and product reviews that I need to write and post, but my energy levels are on empty right now.  I hope you don’t mind if I leave you all with this music video put together by a 10-year-old girl (Watooto From The Nile), who is tired of Lil Wayne’s lyrics degrading women.  I think it’s great that she’s doing all she can to try to make a change. If you follow Natural-ness on Tumblr, you’ve already seen this.  If not, check it out:

I was checking out Curlynikki’s website today and there was an interesting question from a reader.  The reader was asking about hair histories and if there is hope in growing hair longer than you’ve ever had with natural hair.  It made me realize that I never gave a hair history on my own hair.  First – to answer the question, I was able to grow hair longer than I’ve ever had.  The proof?  Here is my brief hair history:

I was one of those babies that was born with a head full of hair, but within months, most of it rubbed off.  I would say that I am probably 4  months old in this picture and I’m definitely hair challenged at the top –

Here I am somewhere in the toddler years.  Once again, my hair was not incredibly long.  My daughter’s hair is currently a lot longer than mine was at her age.

Here is my high school graduation picture.  In between this and my toddler picture, I had presses, relaxers and even a Jerri Curl (yuck).  My hair usually averaged about this length, but I did have short styles at times.

Here I am with hubby.  I lightened the picture up so you can see my hair a bit better.  Again, this was about the average length of my hair.  I’ve been lucky to have had any hair, because I never took great care of my relaxed hair.  I would go up to six months between relaxers because I never wanted to spend the money.  Hair washing?  Let’s just say that I avoided doing it very often because I did not want to loose the straightness and I was never any good at doing my own hair when relaxed.

Here’s my first big chop in July 2005.  I went from over 12 inches to less than 1, but look how damaged my relaxed hair was:

Can you say- see through ends?

This is my 1 year nappiversary.

This was taken in January 2007.

You can see the date of this picture, February 2008.  As you can see, my hair is already longer than any of the relaxed pictures that I posted above.

This is my hair flat ironed in 2008, after 3 years of being natural.  When pulled, my hair was a little past bra strap length.

Here’s the front, much thicker and longer than any of my relaxed hair pictures.

This is my 2nd BC in August 2008. (Oops, I just realized that I got the date wrong.  I did my 2nd bc in August 2009 – sorry about that)!

And last, but not least, a stretch afro picture that I took about a week ago (November 30, 2010).  Better hair care and no chemicals has allowed me to grow hair longer than it ever was relaxed.  I’m curious to see how long my hair gets with this 2nd BC.  I’m going to try not to do any more BCs, just to see my hair growth potential.  Thanks for checking out my hair history!

by CDB

Welcome to the first installment of Breaking Down the Myths. After thinking and thinking and thinking about what to write in this section, I finally came up with a series of questions that should have done the trick and allowed me to write a long series of articles, but they all became small next to the idea of breaking down the myths associated with relationships. When we all look at it, after reading the books and articles and listening to all of the radio personalities who claim to be relationship experts, although they aren’t married, and watching all of the talk show hosts who teach us how to keep it together, it still seems that we have bought into the negative ideas of love and all of the ideas and myths associated with the perceived difficulty of developing and maintaining relationships.
These myths have been around so long that rather than the words being considered cliché, they are now taken as law. We assume a relationship will be difficult. We assume and expect relationships to fail. We know that men are going to cheat and that women are going to retaliate. We know every dude is on the damn downlow and that all women have closet lesbian lovers. Shall I go on?

Before I begin giving relationship advice and presenting myself as an expert; which I’m not, but just imagine you are reading this on a burgundy leather sofa in a room with hardwood floors and paintings on the wall by Ernie Barnes (I’m a sports guy what did you expect). The curtains are pulled open and held by gold colored ropes. The skyline is showing through the window. I have a pen and a pad, my glasses are sitting on my nose and … forget it. I’m your therapist doggone it.
Let’s climb into this discussion on the myth of the difficult relationship.

First, the fact that Black women love Black men to a fault could be one of the foundations of the hard work myth, but that is another topic altogether. Second, sisters who seek to save men (poor cats) or only date certain types of men (rich cats) actually create and sustain the myth of the relationships being hard work. I feel that I am attacking.
Am I placing the blame on Black women here…? Yes and no, I hate ambiguity and indecisiveness, but as with any discussion there is always a refutation and this is not a definitive article.
Relationships are a two sided coin but women do tend to make things a lot more difficult than they have to. Relationships are easy to maintain. If everyone is honest about important things and you lie about small things, your relationship will be fine. Is it this simple? Yes it is. See, most of the time a man does not want to argue and a man will avoid an argument. But women push the issue on things and then misunderstandings take place and everyone ends up hurt and frustrated when the initial reason for arguing was: Why don’t you drive today, I’m tired.
There are very straightforward guidelines for maintaining a relationship and keeping everything easy going. I call them the Caveman Commandments
1. Give man sex often – Many difficulties often stem from the fact that a man might be a bit flirtatious. Now I’m not saying a brother is going to stop flirting, but if he has something to remind him of why he got with you in the first place then he is less likely to act on the flirting. I’m not just talking about the good hard working 30 second loving that us men typically do, make us want to work hard for it. Dammit sneak up on me naked!
2. Don’t get mad when you catch me looking – This is important. Just because I look at another woman doesn’t mean that I am going to cheat. I’m a man. I look at butt. Like John Coffey in the Green Mile, “I can’t hep it.” Don’t get pissed off at me… unless I’m looking on a regular basis. If I’m doing that and I don’t care if you catch me, it’s a wrap.
3. Give men sex often – Oh did I say that one already? Well, at least you know this is important. If I have to go more than a week and a half and your friend is not visiting, trust me I’m either going to start looking at porn or I’m going to start taking the flirting thing a step further. Once again, “I can’t hep it.” And yes, it only takes a week for your man’s eyes to start wandering.
4. Tell me what you want me to do – I’m stupid. Fellas I almost feel bad about this one but man you can’t argue. We are stupid. We don’t feel the same way you (women) do about things like talking, hugging, talking, well just talking. You might really be interested in the latest method of building a stronger relationship, but in all honesty at the end of the day if I don’t get butt, hell I can’t hear anything. I go right into ‘Charlie Brown’s teacher is talking mode.’ (Women you can tell when this happens because we resort to words like, “Yeah, that’s real. I agree one hundred percent.”)
5. Make me talk with you – Don’t let me shut down. If you see something is on my mind, don’t automatically assume it is you or the job. Take me to dinner, not a fancy restaurant, just some pizza and video games and get me to chill out a bit. (We like to eat and one hell of a pizza can actually remedy a lot, no kidding.) Then ask me what’s up. After that give me some butt and I’m straight.

Relationships are not difficult. In all honesty, no jokes, when you approach a relationship with the mentality that it is going to be hard work, you have already generated bad feelings and created problems. Relationships are fun and sometimes challenging but on the whole, the process of learning someone takes a lifetime. If you get bored then problems occur and a relationship can be hard to maintain. But women, men are not going to initiate new things. If you can get a brother to read a book, see a movie, go walking, hiking, go to a museum (especially contemporary art museums, they always have naked art in those), try a new restaurant, read a newspaper, try something different then your relationship will remain interesting which is key in keeping the relationship smooth. This is not ‘hard’ work, this is ‘fun’ work. I guess I’m placing a lot on women to do to make the relationship ‘fun’. Well, this is an unfortunate fact that exists in relationships, men are perfectly content with going to the gym, watching the game and kicking it with the fellas. Everything else is not as important, so women things will fall on your head. It’s not fair but at least you are reading it now. I have one more thing to throw in here to make relationships work… women, keep it tight. I was asked once why Black cats, chase White women. My response was pretty basic and honestly it was a very generic answer, ‘white women are less confrontational and White women work out’. But then I thought about the fact that most of the Black dudes I saw with White women, had fat White women and that kind of killed my answer. Back to the topic, men are like water, we seek the path of least resistance. Now I write all of this with one caveat, men you will have to meet women half way and stop being so lazy (and if you did something to get the women you have to at least do what you did once a month).
The myth of relationships being hard is just that a myth. If we all stop entering into relationships with this cliché in our heads we lay the groundwork for relationships to be less stressful and less about work. Relationships built on the premise of ‘fun’ work will last longer and create more understanding couples.

I hope that you all do not mind too much if I post random things from time to time.  Since life is about a lot more than just hair, I wanted to share this video of my 7 year-old DS performing Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise at a celebration for my grandmother. We need to celebrate our children at all levels and I am very proud of my son for working so hard to memorize this poem and having the courage to recite it in front of a room full of people. So enjoy and if you feel so inspired, please leave him a message below.

If you have problems viewing it, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qjsgJIcU0&feature=channel_page