I don’t mean to post all the time about mein Wee Niblet, but, hand to heaven, he continually provides a mind-boggling amount of fodder.
For example, we have a deal in the household, when the kids are due for haircuts, that they can go sit in a stylist’s chair somewhere and be enveloped by a plastic cape and false gushing about how cute they are–both of which are matter-of-factly laid on by a hair artiste who wishes she hadn’t gotten pregnant at 19–or they can stay home and let me pay them a dollar to cut their hair. The kids spend about thirty seconds teetering on the steely edge of that decision, weighing the bright lights and free lollipop of Cost Cutters against their desire to save up one more dollar towards The American Girl “Feel-Better” Kit, ultimately tumbling towards personal greed over glamorous gratification every time…and saving us about $28 bucks in the process.
Indeed, I’m happy to shell out $2 for my kids to have the nicely-trimmed hair that tells the world somebody loves them.
Of course,
I’m not exactly a professional. I, em, wield good intentions more adeptly than I do a scissors.
In my defense, it’s not exactly a disaster. I mean, who cares if an 8-year-old girl’s hair slants dramatically downward and to the right, when she is viewed from behind? She hardly ever holds still or has all her hair in one place, anyhow. No matter the slant, it still looks all wild and happy when she’s dangling upside down from the monkey bars. Plus, we always have the slick back-up option termed, in spy circles at least, braids.
And who cares if a 5-year-old boy’s eleventy-nineteen cowlicks all conspire to make him appear a Young Einstein, even after the snipping?
Hmmm. Wait a minute. I guess I do. Niblet’s Chia Pet hair is as unruly as the crew of kids on the morning bus ride to school, hair that often leaves him looking tragically untended (incidentally, damn you, third grader Caitlin, for forcing your way into his backpack each day during the drive and pretending to steal his applesauce cup, a little scenario that stresses out my kindergartener to the point that SuperMommy may be riding the bus one day soon wearing the coolest part of her hero’s get-up: the patent-pending Stealth Pincher Hands).
So when I recently cut Niblet’s hair, I decided to use the electric buzzer clipper doohicky wahoonie thingie all over his whole head and not just on the back section. Trying to get his hair to behave, I buzzed the kid’s entire noggin.
Leaving him looking like a sociopath out on a day pass.
Oh, and let’s check the clock at this juncture, shall we? We were a week out from School Picture Day (and 47 subsequent years of mockery, based on that picture).
The hair clearly waddn’t going to grow back in before Picture Guy squeezed the birdie for 500 elementary school kids. (poor Picture Guy: imagine the chafeage after all that “birdie squeezing,” not to mention the prison time)
All of this brings me back to my original point–and I did have one: Niblet offers up endless fodder. Case in point…while I didn’t directly mention to him that he looked kind of scary after Mommy buzzed his skull, I did suggest that Picture Day is traditionally a great time to express personal creativity, and wouldn’t a hat or a wig be a nice touch?
His unique solution, of course, was to choose to wear a hoodie that has monkey ears on it. Naturally, he NEEDED to wear the hood up, ears a perkin’, along with a special necklace made out of three rocks glued together.
So the other day, in front of the camera and for all posterity, Punky proudly sported the monkey ears and covered up his Death Row ‘do.
Other times? He puts on his bathing mask and takes a plunge.
My point, thus, is that when it comes to the Resident Bathtub Diver, I don’t make the news. I just report it.
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