$400 Worth of Hair (alternate title: The Longest Ever "I Got a Haircut" Story)

I think I first heard about the concept of selling your hair in O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi.  I've donated my hair twice to Locks of Love, but for some reason, decided to look up the possibility of selling it.  It turns out there were several places online that you could do this!  So I thought about it..... For a long time...... And finally decided that when I cut my hair next, I'd try to sell it.
Well, when December rolled around, I was dealing with this:

The bottom one is what it looked like after washing and air-drying it.  The ponytail is what it looked like a few days after I washed it, after keeping it tamed down in a braid.  My ponytail was 14 inches long, and over 4 inches around at the band.  That's just a lot of hair, no matter how you look at it.
Don't get me wrong.  I like long hair.  I do think I have pretty hair, even though it may be vain to say so.  But.......  The fact it took me at least 10 minutes just to brush it out every day, and about 20 minutes in the shower whenever I washed it was REALLY getting old.  So I told Paul that the hair had to go before this baby gets here.  He said he was fine with it.  I think he was secretly relieved that he wouldn't be getting yelled at in the middle of the night anymore whenever he rolled over onto it.  :)   I asked him what he thought about me selling it, and he said he was fine if I went ahead and tried.
The website I liked the looks of most was BuyandSellHair.com.  I liked it because you could post several pictures and write as detailed of a description as you wanted, and it sounded like they had a great "tech support" if you have questions or problems.  A "featured" ad was like $26, and would be posted for 3 months.  I figured I'd try it out.... If the three months passed without selling it, I'd still get it cut and just donate it.  I might not sell it, but then I've spent $26 dollars on stupider things.  The hardest thing for me was deciding how much to list it for.  I decided I'd try to get $300, but I'd settle for $150.  But then I looked at several ads with hair similar to mine in color, length, and texture, and most of them wanted over $1000.  Hmmm.......  The question was - what might I get for my hair, and what could I be happy with getting for my hair?  I'd rather sell it than turn people off by a price tag.  I bumped it up to $400.  I figured that by the time I counted the ad price, the haircut, and the shipping, it would be close to $100 anyways.  (It was more like $60, but anyhow.)
I got an offer the same afternoon as my ad posted.  The guy was a creep - asking for more pictures, if I could cut my hair a certain way..... No.  I got a couple other weirdos asking if I'd shave my head/do a pixie cut/military cut.  No.  Then I got an offer from a guy from Minnesota.  He asked if I would cut an extra inch off (I'm guessing to make it an even 15 inches).  I told him I wasn't willing to cut it any shorter, and he said he'd pay the full asking price anyways.  Very straighforward.  As soon as I got the money out of Paypal and into our bank account, I went and cut it.
Night and day.

The night after cutting it, no styling products.  (No, I did not get it permed or colored.)

Because I know you're all dying to see the belly and my children who are still in their pajamas at 6 in the evening.  And my hair that I haven't combed all day.  I'm lazy like that.

I forgot how easy short hair is.  I can comb it out in 10 seconds.  All I have to do to style it is get it wet to make it curl up again.  I do have to wash it more often (2 or 3 times, verses the once a week I was), but it takes like 3 minutes.  I am going to love having short hair.
And as I mentioned in the post about our wreck.... We have a $500 deductible we'll owe to get the truck fixed.  I made the deal on my hair the day after our wreck.  So God provided most of the money for the deductible, money we just didn't have any other way.  It's not the recliner I was hoping to buy with it (nursing mamas need a recliner!), but.....  It's being used for something we really need.  And God obviously knew we were going to be needing it when he put the idea in my head.