When you are a parent, spontaneity is not your friend. I am a planner to a fault, and my husband is the very definition of one who flies by the seat of their pants. He loves being spontaneous, so every once in a while, I make a concentrated effort to plan to do something spontaneous. I know – planning to be spontaneous isn’t being spontaneous, but this is the extent of the deal with the devil that I am willing to make. But every once in a while, the stars align for a brief moment in time, and I agree to do something on a whim. These times rarely end well.
Our son has been sporting the haircut of a very angsty emo teen for a couple weeks now, due to the fact that we have noticed a downward spiral with each haircut that he has. The first one was a breeze – he sat up on his dad’s lap, smiled, and patiently withstood the hair cutting process. From there, it became progressively louder and more challenging. Imagine greasing up a feral cat and asking it to sit still and be groomed. Then add blue suckers covered in hair, a lot of screaming, and phones being thrown in the wild animal’s general direction hoping it would enjoy a YouTube video and calm the heck down. Now you have a picture of what our night looked like.
Around 6:30pm last night, we decided to call a salon near our house and see when their next available appointment would be. As luck would (or wouldn’t) have it, they had an opening at 6:45pm. Putting aside the panic that struck the pit of my stomach at doing something so last minute, I forced my most believable smile and against my better judgment said ‘Sure! We’ll take it!’ Grabbing a sucker for my purse to use as a lure for a well behaved, no tears experience, we loaded up and headed toward the salon, discussing with Clark what we were about to do, and being lied to with every utterance of agreement from him about the plan. We walked in right on time, were greeted, and shown to the chair. That is where things began to unravel.
As she pulled out the shiny cape with the fun animals on it, Clark went from cheerful to screaming bloody murder in 0.42 seconds. She, having the same idea as myself, grabbed the basket of suckers and offered him a token of bribery for allowing her to shape up the mop of hair he had on his head. Sans cape, she calmly grabbed the clippers and slowly turned them on, demonstrating to Clark how they didn’t hurt byrunning them across her arms. Convinced this was all a trap, Clark took the sucker in one hand, and with both hands, put a death grip on his hair and made clear his displeasure at the thought of cutting even one strand. Deciding that it was best to take a break, we sat in the lobby and allowed another customer to go ahead of us.
Said customer was a control freak mom and her 8 year old. FORTY minutes later, the mom was still telling our poor stylist how she didn’t like her son’s hair and wanted it even shorter. So the nice stylist cut it shorter. Then the mom wanted his bangs swept to the side. No, the OTHER side. Judging by how important the bangs were to her, I can only deduce that One Direction is hosting auditions in our town today, and those bangs are her kid’s shot at stardom. Bangs swept to the correct side, the son mentioned how itchy his neck was and mom nearly blew a gasket on the stylist for making the son’s neck itch. All I could think about was how this nice girl was probably going to set her scissors down, walk out the door, and never return. She was incredibly patient, washed the boy’s hair, and then sweetly smiled at us and asked if we were ready to try again. I should have asked if she was well versed in performing exorcisms.
90 minutes, many talks, offers of YouTube videos, a water bottle he was allowed to squirt wherever he wanted, and two suckers later, she did the best she could with scissors only while Clark did his best impression of a very angry honeybadger. And while the hair is finally out of his eyes, he looks as if he was the one entrusted with scissors and left unsupervised to cut his own hair. Out of protection for her business, we promised not to use the stylist’s name or salon, as this is not a reflection of her skills and talents. It is, however, a glaringly accurate picture of what happens when you think a spur of the moment haircut an hour before bedtime on a 2 year old is a good idea…
