Often my girls want to have their hair down, but then they hate hair on their face. Hair clips and headbands won’t help, as they come off easily. I’ve solved the problem by making headbands out of their hair. There are loads of options for making nice braided headbands: lace braid headband, knotted headband, ladder braid headband etc, but the simplest one to start with, is the french braid headband:

You start by sectioning off hair from around the face for the headband and putting the rest of the hair on a ponytail. Then just do a french braid starting form one ear and heading towards the other. I did this one on my 2-year old daughter, who has a lot of thin and fine baby hair on the sides, so I had to take very little hair into the braid at each ”stitch”.

After french braiding from one ear to the other, you open the ponytail at the back, and Voila! This hair do shows off her lovely curls, but also keeps her hair out of her face (and out of food etc).

I know that a lot of 2-year-olds won’t sit still for this, so this probably works better on a 4-year old. And if you try this, and it feels too difficult to start the braid from the thin hair around the ear,  you can do a half headband by starting the french braid from where her parting normally is, or doing two half headbands starting from the middle, or slightly to the side. (And check out how you get them to sit still here).