My original motivation for growing my hair and donating it, was my cousin’s wife’s diagnosis 2 years ago of breast cancer.  Fortunately, despite the near hopeless prognosis they originally gave her she is doing remarkably well.  I was so sad to hear this morning that her sister was just diagnosed with breast cancer as well (caught very early).  When I first heard about Laura, I wanted to somehow donate my hair to a woman battling cancer, perhaps someone who also has small children.  I never found a way to do that and I just decided to donate to Locks of Love as it’s a very worthy organization.

Today, however, I just happened to turn on Oprah and what did I see but Hillary Swank chopping off her hair to donate to the type of organization I’ve been looking for!  The name of the organization is Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths.  They are currently trying to reach the donation milestone of a million inches.  I’ll add my 12 inches to that!

The other interesting thing on the show was that they did hair makeovers on 100 people and then posted all of them on Oprah.com.  If you are looking for a new do, it’s actually a great place to look as you can see the before and know if they have hair that’s like yours.  I often see hair styles I like but with my huge mass of hair I can’t be sure if most of them would work for me.  With this I can.

I really liked these two.

Ok, Christine just sent me these photos a few minutes ago and I think I’m sitting here like an idiot with my jaw hanging down just staring at the photos trying to soak it all in!  This is her Spring Banner that is the her project kit for April.

I am in love.  If Alice makes a remarkable recovery, I know what I’m doing this weekend!

One of our customers from Massachuetts is moving to our little town in Oregon!  Actually her husband is from here so not quite as random as it sounds.  They are out here finalizing things with his new job and doing a bit of house hunting.  I met her for lunch yesterday.  As we were going to have a 5, 3, 2 & 1/2 year old and an 11 month old we decided to try out the new kids cafe in town.

Mistake.  Plain and simple.

By the time we left it was just so awful it was just funny.  The menu was not exactly enticing and I think diet coke on the menu is a must if you are catering to moms or at least SOMETHING diet!  There was no separate eating area and play area so there was food mushed in with the toys.  The food we ordered took 45 minutes!  You just cannot do that with hungry kids.  Also, her little girl is a very picky eater but loves mac and cheese.  Well, this was no mac and cheese that she recognized (egg noodles, white cheese and parm on top) so she refused to eat it.  Other kids were crawling all over our table, drinking our kids’ drinks and even when asked repeatedly to move kept playing while the waitress was trying to put the food out.  There was a little seesaw in there that was way too big and dangerous for the space (luckily we had just one accident with it).  Alice, who had seemed perfectly fine when we left the house, was a shaking, feverish mess by the time we left.  It was so comical by the end it would actually have been funny to hang a bit longer and see what else could have gone wrong!

So, the final words in my restaurant review: Don’t go.

The kids were supposed to spend the weekend with their former babysitter and her entire family camping at the coast (they have an enormous RV so it wasn’t as if they were going to be hunkering down in a tent in the freezing rainy conditions).  Scott and I had all these lovely visions in our head of what the weekend would hold for us — big bike rides (him), scrapbooking and a trip to the gym (me), going out and actually seeing a movie, and the highlight of the weekend — going to a coffeeshop, hanging out for hours and actually reading the NYT!!!  Yeah, not happening.  Alice has a fever of 103 this morning.  Poor baby is miserable.  Bye-bye blissful weekend!

On a Cocoa Daisy note, we’ve loaded the store with all of the April products if you’d like a peek at the upcoming add-ons!