From Tami: Hair It Is!

Baby hair is the best. Soft, sweet, wispy hair. Even in preschool, I find that there is something so innocent and endearing about my children’s hair. I often let my boys’ hair grow until people confused them with girls, just because I couldn’t bear to cut it. Also, my little ones always hated haircuts, so it worked for everyone.

Back when there were (only!) three kids in my house, my two oldest daughters decided to make a clay crown for their baby brother. They must have been playing princesses or something, and wanted him to be the prince. A prince needs a crown. Clay is an excellent material for crown-making, apparently.

I went to pick up my baby from his bassinet only to discover a prince with a circlet of clay firmly embedded in his spiky baby hair. I tried everything I could do to remove it, and nothing worked. He only really had fuzz on his head, but every bit of it was encrusted with clay. I had to sit there and cut every single bit of it out. It was tragic. (Also, why should kid’s clay be so hard to remove? Shouldn’t it be washable, like markers?)

Sometimes, the haircuts happened without my knowledge.

One of my daughters cut her own bangs at school, right before her kindergarten play. She walked out, dressed as a flower, and I noticed something was off kilter. Did her hair break, from her ponytail? I took a closer look and was mortified. Her bangs were cut at a sharp angle, with one side normal length and the other cut so short that she had little frizzies sticking off of her forehead. It took forever for that to grow out again.

She is the only one I can think of who cut her own hair (although there are eleven of them, so I probably just blocked it out—I’m sure it happened), but I have other kinds of hair stories as well.

My kids were terrified of haircuts, so to minimize the trauma I always cut their hair. I got pretty good at it over the years, but my first few years of motherhood had a few sad results. My poor children. I would like to say that I always made them look adorable, but pictures don’t lie. Unfortunately.

Luckily, there were benefits to all of these hair-related stressors. Occasionally—once I was good enough at hair styling—my friends would have me cut the hair of their salon-shy children. Their kids knew me, so they sat still and calmly throughout the trim. I was also able to clean up my kids’ hair before big events, if they hadn’t had time to get a nice cut.

But my favorite story about kid-hair-trauma is about someone else’s kids (probably why it’s my favorite story, if I think about it). Good friends of ours have twin girls, who have beautiful strawberry-blonde hair. When they were about four, their father was watching them while their mother was out. He called me in a panic—the girls had gotten Laffy-Taffy stuck in their beautiful, long hair. He was terrified that his wife/my friend would find out, and possibly murder him. I told him to come over, and I did a quick internet search for every possible way to remove taffy from hair. We tried ice. We tried peanut butter. We tried toothpaste. Ultimately, we found a solution that worked. We mixed up a paste of water and baking soda, massaged it into the taffy clumps, and combed it out. It took forever, but we got all of the taffy off of both of them. I’m pretty sure his wife still doesn’t know. (If she finds out from this, it should be okay. The twins are in high-school now!)

Luckily hair grows back, and a few weeks or months of embarrassment are not such a terrible price to pay for a lifetime of stories. Whether your kids like to change their hair from time to time or not, or “tattoo” their skin with pens, or paint their nails with markers, it isn’t permanent. But you already know that.

That’s why you’re a SuperMom.

Tami