just in time for spring (one can hope!)

coco got a fresh haircut yesterday, courtesy of my somewhat questionable skills. i normally cut his hair with scissors and a comb, but it had gotten a bit shaggy so i tried with clippers and let me tell you - the answer to your kid-haircuttery dreams! quick, even and a minimum of fuss - except for the handful of hair that mysteriously found it's way into coco's mouth!

i find he always looks so much older with his hair trimmed.  afterwards he enjoyed riding the skytrain and asking folks if they liked his hairdo!

diy 'do

ever since cole started producing his second crop of hair, sometime shortly after his first birthday (the first round was dark! and fell out over the first few months), i'd gone back and forth between two thoughts: "oh it's so soft and curly and cute and i love it and could never cut it" and "man, this hair is getting fuzzy and full of yogurt crust - it's comin' off soon". i loved cole's baby curls and snuggling in their soft babyness was something i did all day long (i'm sure, to stem the tide of future schoolyard embarrassment, i will stop doing this eventually). just as once i couldn't picture him with hair, i couldn't picture him without his fuzzy baby curls. case in point:

but for some time, my head had been telling me that it was probably time, so last week i started nosing around, inquiring about where folks took their wee people for haircuts. i got a few great recommendations for a place at the lonsdale quay and their website certainly made the haircuts look like fun - sit in a race car! excitement! i kind of thought this might prove problematic for cole because he is extremely interactive with stuff like that and he'd be all over it asking for money to make it jiggle and trying to find where to put the dollars. and, to be honest, i'm getting kind of cheap lately, what with the home purchasing and all - $20+ for a kids haircut seemed like a lot, considering it might be a debacle and the cuts i saw where not anything that looked too complicated... i used to cut jamie's hair (ah, my only victim aside from barbie) and we have haircutting scissors etcetera, so last night i made up my mind to just go for it at home.

i got cole all excited about his new fancy hairdo this morning - it helped that i got one on saturday and he loved our made-up haircutting song "i'm gonna go get a hair cut, and then i'll look so fan-cee." i convinced him to get back into the highchair after breakfast this morning with promises of a few mini marshmallows for his trouble. he was so easygoing about it! no trouble at all - just requests for more marshmallows and more spraying and a bit of "hair? hair??" and pawing at his tongue. i collected his little curls up for a keepsake and voila - fancy big boy hair:

it's got a curl to it and i left a little on top, so it rumples nicely - not quite so straight-across as it looks in that first photo... i'm not suggesting i'm an awesome hairdresser or anything, but i am so relieved that i didn't do anything weird to his hair! he still has short little baby hair at his sideburns and forehead, so some of the trickiest parts didn't require a lot of work. and i'm happy to note that his hair is still just as soft and definitely just as snuzzly. (i think here i'm actually saying silly things in his ear trying to get him to stand still, but i like this one and you know what i mean...) ;-)

the new do

so i got a haircut on sunday. my usual haircut factory type place on west georgia. i went in because i was out looking for pants (why good-fitting clothes are so hard to find) and i couldn't find any that were any better than the pants i had at home. i was getting frustrated. and my hair was in need of a trim anyway, so why not? called for an impromptu appointment and they could fit me in with some person i'd not seen before, so in i went.

out i came with a reverse mullet! i don't know what i had agreed to, but i went in with slightly mangy overgrown hair that was otherwise reasonably acceptable and came out with a CENTRE-PARTED FULL-FRINGED REVERSE MULLET! i'm not up on my hairdo terminology to know a better word for something that leaves me with a much shorter back and two seemingly unrelated non-graduated dangly wads of hair on either side of my head. from the front it actually looked ok, but from the side i looked strange and from the back i looked like i must have cut my hair myself! i didn't really come to appreciate those angles until i was at home.

so back to the haircut factory i went. of course, i'm nice, so i didn't want to offend the very nice haircutting person who had given me the reverse mullet and i made some randomly babbled excuse about liking each part separately but not altogether at once on my head... she trimmed about a centimetre off the dangly bits and then prepared to finish - i had to tell her to keep going about three more times until it was evened(ish) out...

now i have a sort of blunt bob (verging on mom hair) but that is much better than something that looked like the gateway to kate gosselin's dead possum hairdo.