Natural hair is all the craze right now. #TeamCurly #TeamNatural and #CurlyHair are draped across all the beautiful curly-haired selfies these days.

But one hashtag we don’t see nearly enough is one I tend to give the most credit: #NaturalHairProblems.

The tangles, the snags, and the headaches… I’m all about embracing my locks and teaching my children to love theirs. But I’ve gotta admit, sometimes, it’s a pain in my rear.

Take yesterday for example. I was on a shoot at a local aquarium with two young boys who want and need to be adopted. We’re having a good time, petting the different sea animals and reptiles when we decide to go in the parrot aviary.

A few minutes before we had fed the parakeets so I didn’t think this would be much different. They just seemed a little bigger.

Instead of handing us birdseeds when we walked in, the handlers gave us a type of fruit nectar that the birds enjoy. I guess that should have been the first red flag since one of the ingredients they mentioned I’m pretty sure was coconut water, and the night before I put a shea butter and coconut oil cream in my hair to hold the twists.

The birds flew down and ate out of our hands like before, but a couple of them also started landing on my head. I could feel one of them hanging out for a bit when I looked in the camera to see what it was up to.

From the reflection I could see it biting one of my twists as if it was trying to devour a tasty worm.

I reached up to try to shoo it off my head when it bit me. Then when it tried to fly away it got its foot ensnared in my hair.

I’m not gonna lie, I panicked for a moment. A bird was stuck in my hair. Not many people can say that. He was freaking out just as much as I was, and my fellow co-worker and cameraman just stood by and filmed it all. I didn’t realize he was still recording my near-death experienced until after the fact. He assures me he would have put the camera down had he seen blood. Very reassuring.

Luckily the bird handler was calm and helpful in getting the bird unsnagged. Ultimately I had to sacrifice my hand and take a nibble beating while getting the last bit of the bird’s foot out of my hair.

Have you ever seen the movie Birds? Yea, I watched that in high school and visions of the horror scenes have been coming back to me since this experience yesterday. Am I traumatized? Umm, not really. But will I be going into any rooms with free-flying parrots any time soon? Hail nah.

Could this have happened to someone with straight hair? I’d say anything is possible. But for me, it was just another day in the life of my daily curly hair struggles. I’ll just add this my running list of failures.

I won’t leave this post on a bad note though. Naturally curly hair also has it’s perks. My son sometimes keeps snacks in his hair for later. When it was longer pretzel sticks were easily stored away, right now he has to stick to smaller items like cereal or goldfish.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve found in your hair, or your kid’s hair?

Tags: funny stories, natural hair, stories I want to remember