Tag archive for "MyBrownBeauty"

My Girls

My Little Glamour Dolls and Their Pink Polish

3 Comments 27 September 2009

I don’t know where they get it from, these chocolate little girl pies with their affinity for baby pink fingernail polish and glossy lips and butterfly necklaces and cute shoes. It’s certainly not from their mother. Most afternoons when Mari and Lila tumble off the school bus and up the front stoop giggling, twists flying, pink fingernails slicing through the air, I greet them in shorts and oversized t-shirts, hair barely combed, lips crackling, finger nails chipped and in serious need of a manicurist’s intervention. Some days, Lila pulls out her strawberry lemon lip balm (she calls it her lipstick) and gently pushes it in my face as I lean in for a “welcome home” smooch. Apparently, the 7-year-old’s got a problem with chapped lips.

Whatever. Clearly, getting red-carpet ready for the after school rush of homework, activities, and dinner isn’t really all that high on my list of priorities.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST ON MY NEW BLOG ON PARENTING.COM’S THE PARENTING POST.

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Thought

Time For You: Nourish Your Inner Lusciousness

15 Comments 14 September 2009


UPDATE: CONGRATULATIONS JEWELRY ROCKSTAR—YOU’RE THE WINNER OF THE NATURI QUENCH GIVEAWAY! SHELLEY WILL REACH OUT TO YOU DIRECTLY FOR YOUR INFORMATION. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED!

By SHELLEY CHAPMAN

The other day I was having a conversation with my friend about being busily productive. We both were making strides in our academic and entrepreneurial pursuits AND we were both exhausted! How easy it was for us to describe our lists of daily tasks, to-do-lists, upcoming events to attend, penciled in meetings, appearance-only engagements and our accomplishments of the week. We were painting a total picture of success, right? NOT! How is not taking time for yourself success? We were both missing our personal time, fully overloaded, sleepy and gasping for air!

My mom always told me, “how you care for yourself is how you care for others.” *Gasp* Here I am thinking that I’m offering all that I have and being of use. Well, I’m definitely offering all that I have. As far as being of use? Yeah, not so much. So, I took it as my cue to realign myself with the very core of my being and my business, Naturi Beauty, where I offer products and services by promoting radiance from crown to core by encouraging three concepts: nourish, nurture and grow.

For some of us this doesn’t always come easy. The reasons—I mean excuses—are innumerable, from not being used to putting ourselves first, to not having enough money to do what we want, to not finding time. Well, I say there is no such thing as not enough! We create time, not find it. Get used to putting yourself first; there is nothing wrong with it. You deserve it! For those that live on the other side of prosperity, never let what funds you think you don’t have stop you from having the most precious gifts we could give to ourselves: time and attention.

There are enough “Stop and Smell the Roses” self-care tips. Naturi Beauty takes it a step further and encourages you to “CREATE the Roses!” So with that said, I have taken the dutiful liberty of creating a starter self-care list. You can do it by yourself or with a delightful partner of your choosing. Dig it:

Naturi Beauty’s Suggestions to Nourish, Nurture and Grow

1. Celebrate Your Body
Create a spiceful, intimate evening with your partner. Reserve an area in the house and transform it into an art studio. Lay down a protective barrier for the floor (an old sheet or painter’s drop cloth will do the trick). Lay down comfortably and allow your partner to decorate your nude temple using sensuous brushstrokes with varying degrees of pressure. Do not direct the experience, allow him/her to be creative and enjoy feeling your body being worshiped. Once the master piece is complete, hand your partner the camera, strike a sexy pose and model away!

2. Indulge in Scrumptious Delights:
Gone are the days where cooking is a chore and a bore! Step into the new millenium and sign up for a Girls Night Out Cooking Class! What more fun can it be than to indulge in some serious grown, sisterly, unadulterated food play for your self! No husband, no children, just your own tastes to fulfill while sipping on a glass of wine. Sounds good to me. Many cooking schools offer Girls Night Out cooking courses; check Viking Cooking School for your local classes and times. (Of course, you also could gather up your girlfriends and your own favorite recipes and take turns teaching each other how to cook them in your own house.) Get dressed, travel to a culinary destination with your girls, cook and indulge in global cuisine with all the prep work done. Enjoy without the guilt, the calorie count and the budget check. Celebrate each other, savor the bite, relish in the feeling of consuming pure deliciousness and swallow heaven. Yummmmmmm!

3. Dance! It’s the Feminine Art of Sensuality:
Dance is a healing universal gift and language. It speaks to our souls, our bodies, our minds and our WOMBS! Yes that’s right, our wombs. Movement is a feminine art and is sensually expressed in dances such as Belly Dance, Salsa and Soukous. Feeling the sexy sway of our hips, the undulations of our curves and the subtle arches in our back bring about a desirous and powerful feminine force! Put on your waist beads, your “come hither” threads, let your hair down and embrace the part of you that is soft, willing and open. Your mind, body, heart, and womb will thank you. (So will your partner—wink, wink!)

To celebrate the grand opening of Naturi Beauty Concepts, MyBrownBaby is teaming up with Naturi’s founder, Shelley Chapman, to give away a jar of her all-natural Naturi Quench, an intense moisturizing cream with Hemp and jojoba oils, aloe and honey—designed to rejuvenate dry hair and restore moisture and sheen. It’s great for daily moisture, smoothing edges and styling touch ups, and works wonders for braids, twists and braid-twist outs. Akilah at Execumama speaks highly of the product, and I’m going to buy a coupla jars for Mari and Lila’s hair, for sure.

Want a jar of your own? Here are three ways to win:

1. Go over to Naturi Beauty Concepts and become a follower and then leave a comment HERE on MBB telling me you did.

2. Check out the Naturi Beauty Concepts website and leave a comment here telling me something good about what you learned there.

3. Tweet about this giveaway, and leave the link to your tweet in the comments section here on MyBrownBaby.

This contest will run until 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, September 17, 2009. The winner will be picked via Random.org, and announced on MyBrownBaby on Friday, September 18, 2009. The prize, which retails for $20, will be sent directly from Naturi Beauty Concepts. Good luck!

Photo credit: The beautiful picture illustrating this post is from the luscious site, Gorgeous Black Women

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Thought

Ha’ Mercy: My 10-Year-Old’s Body Is Too Bootylicious For Kidswear

20 Comments 03 August 2009

I took Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—school shopping this weekend… in the ladies’ section. It seems my days of buying pretty little dresses and jeans embellished with sparkles and rainbows are numbered.

And now, my heart is broken.

And I have the shakes.

Because my Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—is only 10.

Ten, dammit.

And I just wasn’t prepared to watch my 10-year-old daughter suffer through the gut-wrenching fitting-room agony of having to squeeze and pull and stretch into a children’s clothing size that officially is no longer available to her. With her little sister flitting about in one super-cute outfit after the other, Mari and I had to fold each of the near dozen pants I’d hauled into the fitting room and put them back on the shelf. Our march from GapKids to just the plain ol’ Gap was a reluctant and slow one; I did a decent job of hiding my tears, but my sadness was unmistakable: When—and how!—did my 10-year-old child get too big for a size 14?

She is athletic and active—a lover of pasta, but also healthy portions of rainier cherries and juicy nectarines, sautéed string beans and okra and even brussels sprouts. She’s not prone to snacking, and would just as soon drink water than suck down punch and carbonated drinks. Even at her tender age, Mari is conscious about how her food choices can help or harm her body, and so really, she’s done nothing to warrant being banished to the land of low-cut tops and barely-covering-the-crack jeans reserved for the more daring—the more adult.

No, this is my fault. My baby’s inherited her mother’s blessed/cursed curves—the wide hips and the thick thighs and the uber-round bubble booty and the tiny waist that render good pants fits virtually impossible, sans a paycheck’s worth of cash wasted on tailors charged with getting the clothes to fit right.

And I feel absolutely horrible about this.

And helpless.

I remember what it was like to have to bypass all the cute, colorful clothes in the Garanimals section at Penny’s and Macy’s and go down the escalator to the junior’s section with my mom; as I recall, she wasn’t too thrilled about the switch, either, and made a point of letting me know this by not-so-subtly suggesting I lay off the Oreos and do some exercise so I could get back into the children’s section. Mind you, I was skinny as a rail, save for the butt and hips, but it was exactly that, I think, that scared my mom. She was a black mom in America, after all, with intimate knowledge of what black men—specifically young black men—lust after: hips and booty. I think that in her mind, the bigger mine got, the more chance some little boy would pounce on her daughter, opening her up to a cascade of hormone-driven, adolescent problems—a literal ticking time-bomb that could lead to, at best, having to mend her daughter’s broken heart, at worst, having to change a grandbaby’s diaper.

Bettye wasn’t trying to be anybody’s grandma—at least not until her daughter graduated college, found herself a good job with a good paycheck and good benefits, and exchanged her “I do’s” with a man who was ready, willing, and able to care for a family of his own.

And so she set about building her own personal dam to stem the tide of adolescence: She commenced to doing everything she could to convince me that boys weren’t an option. By forbidding me to date. And insisting I stay in the house huddled beneath her and my Dad instead of out at the roller skating rink or the bowling alley or the mall with my friends. And by making me feel like my hips and bubble butt were a problem—something that wasn’t natural. That needed correcting. I can still remember the day she came into my room and suggested I walk backward on my butt to make it “flatten out a little.” I can still remember, too, how frustrated and angry I got when, after weeks of scooting across my rough beige carpet, the only thing I’d accomplished was giving myself rug burn and a really bad self-esteem issue that lasted way into my early 20s, when I finally gave up trying to hide all of this under big shirts, thick sweaters and baggy pants.

My ass was—and always will be—big and wide and round.

And there was no amount of scooting or camouflaging that was going to change that.

It is this that I kept repeating to myself as I walked Mari to the women’s section at The Gap—over to the sale rack, in a desperate search for size 0 women’s shorts with kid, not adult, price tags. It is not her fault that she’s got my hips and thighs and butt. And there is nothing I can do to change them.

What I can do, though, is encourage her to accept and love the curves God’s thrown her way, all the while helping her to hold on to that innocence. Nick and I are doing a pretty good job of it; when we recently asked her to describe herself in a word, she said, “strong.” This much is true: She gleefully dives into physical competitions with her precociously athletic cousin, and even sometimes bests him. She also loves to sweat, and run, and make her body do things that most 10-year-old girls already are too self-conscious to try. Right now, she’s focused more on all the great things it can do, rather than the problems it can cause.

I’ll help her keep her eyes on that prize—to help her sidestep the black girl booty baggage, even as her 10-year-old body does its not-so-slow march to Beyonce bootylicious womanhood. Thank God, she still enjoys wrapping herself up in the intricacies of a new SpongeBob episode and the wonder of erecting a fantastically colorful chalk city in the middle of our concrete driveway.

She is still a little girl.

And for this, I am grateful, even if we do have to bid size 14 a sad farewell.

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Thought

Don’t Stare Too Hard: Of Wives and Hair

8 Comments 30 June 2009

By NICK CHILES

When your wife changes her hair, it has the effect of an earthquake in the house. And if extra hair was added, or hair was cut, or color changed, we’re talking something like 8.0 on the Richter scale.

This monumental event hit the Chiles household recently, and we’re still trying to put all the furniture back in its place.
For my girls, it’s all happy happy joy joy, like getting new clothes for one of their dolls. That’s because, in their minds, Mommy is a giant, walking baby doll anyway—her hair is there for the combing, her nails there for the painting, her outfits there to be picked over.

But for the husband? New hair is a terrifying yet exciting development. First of all, what happens if you like it too much? Just like you don’t want to get too attached to goldfish because they’re just gonna die soon, you can’t grow too fond of a particular hairstyle because she’s probably already plotting and planning the next change. And of course you can’t show your displeasure at the change, because you are then saying, I don’t like your hair.

It’s like a huge relationship Rubik’s Cube—the whole thing is perhaps too confusing for our male brains to puzzle together.
This is the trauma I faced when my wife popped up with the new hair. Walking on eggshells for days. Scared to look at it too close, too much. You know—don’t stare directly at the sun. Show too much excitement and she starts thinking, What does it mean that he likes my hair so much? Is my husband that superficial? I am not my hair!

But of course the alternative is worse. Show too little enthusiasm and you can kiss goodbye any hopes of running your hands through it later when the kids are sleep. (Oh wait, I’m tripping: I’m talking about a black woman here. ‘Bout the only thing my fingers would be passing through are the loose strands on her old ratty headwrap.) What, you don’t like it? she will ask, as she clutches her arms around her torso in horror. And as all husbands know, you never get a second chance to give a first impression. Your very first reaction to the new hair is the only very first reaction you will get, so it better be good. As a matter of fact, knowing that she was going to the hairdresser to get a brand new hairstyle, I decided that I couldn’t leave this crucial first impression to chance. I started practicing it in the mirror. The eyes are key when you’re working with a woman who has been reading your expressions for the past 15 years. If you can’t sell the eyes, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with the mouth.

You’re toast.

As it turned out, I liked the hair. A lot. And that started getting me worried: first, as I already said, that she would be disturbed if I liked it too much—after all, that would mean I didn’t like it before; and then, that I would become too attached and it would all be over in a week when she decided she didn’t like it anymore.

No, when it comes to hair, the safest position is casually disinterested interest. Or perhaps casually interested disinterest. You get the picture—smile, nod, tell her she looks good, and keep it moving. No slobbering.

For the record, it warms MyBrownWifey’s heart that MyBrownHubs loved the hair, particularly since it’s styled in a way I’ve never styled it before. Want to know why I changed it? WANT TO SEE THE NEW HAIR? Head on over to DOVE.COM to read my blog post about it, and check out the picture Nick took for the MY BIO page.

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