As I'm sure many of you recall, Grace was born with a heck of a head of hair. It's one of the first things I noticed about her. My first thought was "She's beautiful." My second thought, "Wow--look at that hair." Over time, her hair thinned and came back getting progressively lighter and crazier. For a while she sported a crazy curly q cowlick that, despite best efforts, nobody could tame. You could literally push down with your hand on it and it sprang right back up. As Grace's hair grew longer, the cowlick was tamed and we had fun experimenting with head bands and barrettes.
But now the child refuses to wear anything in her hair. When she was little I used to fantasize about how great it would be to put little pigtails in her hair and have people ooh and ahh over how cute she looked. Hair accessories, though, have taken on new importance--a degree of practicality. I like to keep it out of her eyes and as much as possible out of hands reach when she's eating. My husband jokes that she prefers natural styling products-bananas, oatmeal, etc. All attempts to accessorize her hair have basically failed. She flails and screams while I pin her arms down to put one stinking barrette in. She finds it immediately, rips it out, shows it to me as if she's taunting me with it, then obsessively pats her head for the next five minutes trying to see if I've snuck anything else in there. I think the taunting is what gets me.
It's not as if we've never cut Grace's hair. A few trims here and there but nothing very monumental. I don't like to go near the kid's face with scissors. If you've seen her in action, you can understand my fear. My husband is not quite as fearful as I am and actually got in a good bang trim a few months ago. You see, he had watched a video on how to groom your dog. Well, we fast forwarded through most of it. It was just plain silly. We spend a fair amount of money on taking Captain Idiot to the groomer so we figured we'd get some clippers and do it ourselves. My husband, having lived through the Depression, really liked this idea. So out back they went and two hours later they were done. Digby looked traumatized and my spouse was drenched in sweat and cursing under his breath. Grace looked at me puzzled and we both shrugged our shoulders. We go to the groomer now. But having watched that video, my husband was inspired and gave Grace a decent trim. If only Digby had the hair of a 13 month old child . . .
The hair had grown increasingly out of control and growing more each day into a vintage 80s mullet so off we went to Wiggle Worms, a children's hair cuttery. Grace mostly sat still in her police car cruiser as they snipped away. A little boy next to us was screaming bloody murder which made Grace pretty skeptical. I shot the nanny a "You better get that kid under control look" and she frantically tried to entertain him. But the Teletubbies were on and Grace hung in until the end. I wish I could say it looks dramatically different, but it doesn't-just less like an 80s rock star. For six bucks you couldn't beat it. When we left there were lots of moms waiting with heir kids. They all looked really, really annoyed. I suppose someday I'll be annoyed too but I was really excited on this day as we checked off another "baby's first."
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