My daughter was born with a full head of black hair. I was a bald baby and my husband was born with hair covering his entire body, so I think we got a happy medium with our daughter. To this day I can picture the adorable swirl her hair did on the back of her head, and I can’t see a newborn baby’s hair swirl without thinking back on my daughter when she was a newborn.

Although plenty of parents have told me that their baby’s hair fell out after birth, my daughter retained all her hair and promptly got to work growing more. Most people who met my daughter commented on her impressive head of hair, and I probably could have started putting barretts in her hair right away if I wasn’t terrified that she would have plucked them out and choked on them. So I let her hair go wild, and it spiked up on the top of her head as though she was electrified.

Basically, she looked like a really cute Fraggle. It was awesome.

There was only one day during the newborn stage when I really tried to tame her hair into something a little more girly. My husband was about to graduate from college, so I had made an appointment to get a portrait done of our daughter holding the tassel from his graduation cap. I was really sneaky about it; he had no idea I intended the photo to be his graduation gift.

Wouldn’t you know it…after I had spent the morning wetting down her hair and getting it “just so,” my husband arrives home from work because he forgot something. He walks right up to her and – of course – tousles her hair in an affectionate gesture. So much for the perfect hairdo for the portrait.

The portrait will live in infamy: There’s my daughter, cute as can be, grasping a tassel and proudly displaying her Fraggle hair. It’s one of my favorite pictures.