Owen's Hair Cut

So, Owen is getting ready to turn four years old next week. And I have the tradition that when the kids are turning a new age, I get some pictures done of them - either at Wal-Mart or we just go out and find a place with a pretty background and I do a photo shoot with them myself. Well, the leaves around here are turning autumn colors and finding beautiful backgrounds isn't really hard to do; so I was just going to take the kids to a park and do Owen's 4 year-old pictures myself.

But before we went to do his pictures I wanted to give him a little trim to make his hair look nice and styled ~ simple enough idea, right? With Owen...wrong!His hair was just starting to grow out from his "bald" cut from a few months ago and it was at that awkward stage of growing out. It really only needed trimming around his ears and the back buzzed to shorted that part out. I was going to leave the top the length it was and let it keep growing out more. I started out with the buzzers to get around the bottom and on the sides when I got a rare phone call from my best friend in England, so, naturally enough, I stopped his haircut and told him he could keep watching his cartoon and I was going to go talk to my friend for a little while. Now, I have known Owen, well, all his life. And I know the wonderful, marvelous, mischievous, trouble-making child he is/can be. Which meant that before I left the room, I did unplug the buzzers and put them out of reach. (He had a bald cut last time because he had buzzed bis bangs, so I didn't want to repeat that again!)

After about 10 minutes on the phone Teagan comes to me, very calmly, and tells me that Owen is buzzing his hair. Yikes! Here we go again! I rush to the front room to find Owen grinning ear to ear with the buzzer in his hands. His hair doesn't look too badly, he buzzed two little strips, one in front of each ear. The snippets weren't too noticeable, especially from the front, so I figured there would be a way to fix it...nothing too damaging had been done. I let him be, remind him that he is NOT allowed to touch the hair buzzers, and tell him I would fix his hair when I got off the phone. Out comes the plug, up go the buzzers, kisses go on his (spottily) shaved head, and I leave the room again.

So, another 30 blissful minutes of conversation pass and I hear a slight buzzing coming from the front room...again! I rush to see what he is doing, and again, my cute little monkey is sitting in the middle of the room with an enormous smile on his little face. This time, he has an airplane landing strip going down his head! Last time I didn't freak out, I could fix those ones, but this.... yeah, there was no covering this one up!
After laughing for a good two minutes while trying to explain to my friend what he had just done, I find that I do need to get off the phone and deal with this ~ although looking back on it, I could have stayed on longer, I mean, what more damage was he really going to do?! But I do get off and then I try to figure out what kind of Halloween character he cam go as for Halloween that would make this haircut look like it was done on purpose. Because what kind of mom would let the same haircutting mishap happen twice in the same year to the same child ~ certainly not one like me who is on top of things, right?! So, characters, um... he wants to be Spiderman, but Spiderman has a full head of hair... Wolverine maybe, just add a couple more lines on each side... a punk rocker - I could finish buzzing strange designs all around... a rap artist - I could buzz his name on his head... yeah, I've got nothing that is going to make this work! So I decide that I am just going to have to buzz the whole thing and call it a new beginning...again.

He is thrilled with this idea - the kid is a bit different and really loves being bald! One of his favorite people in the world, Uncle Erick, shaves his head bald, so Owen thinks it is a wonderful idea for him to shave his head bald as well! Buzzers in hand, I take off the remaining hair that he had on his scarred, bruised and bumped noggin. Much to his thrill and my sadness. the two bruises and bumps he had on the front of his head that were hidden under his hair now stick out like non-symmetrical horns protruding off his head. But he was as thrilled as could be, and I guess that made it okay in the end. At least as far as he was concerned! There's always the promise that hair grows out again!