Crooked Pigtails

Slightly

I may have overreacted, but only slightly, because she cut! her! hair!

At the time Miss A cut her hair it was braided, and because it was braided (she essentially cut off the end of the braid), the result was shorter, randomly placed, layers all over her head.  Basically, she looked like she had a really bad layered cut, layers that stuck out all over.  I brushed it all out and hoped that it would blend, which it did--while she was standing still, while I continued to brush.  As soon as I stopped, it sprang out all over.

I spent last night oscillating between thanking my lucky stars and sobbing; thanking my lucky stars because know it could have been so much worse.  She could have cut off the entire braid, she could have chopped a chunk of hair at the scalp, she could have given herself bangs.  I kept thinking maybe we could just let it be, wait for it to grow out, maybe it's not that bad. 

Then sobbing because it was bad.  It was bad enough.  I'd think about how gorgeous her hair is, then about all the events we have coming up: Easter, Miss H's First Communion, dance recitals, all major photo events.  And her gorgeous hair had horrible, pointy layers, and what if she lost her curls?

***Yes, I know it's just hair!!  But, it's my child's hair, and I have the right to be shallow for a moment.***

This morning we went to the children's salon where Miss A sat in a pink Jeep  and watched The Aristocats while the stylist and I discussed adding additional layers to help blend the layers Miss A cut.

Miss A sat in the Jeep watching the movie and requesting that only pink and white hair clips be used on her hair.  She agreed to allow the light blue because it matched the Jeep, but full out refused the black. 

In the end, we decided more layers were not the answer and took her length up to the offending layer.  Miss A loves her new cut; Mommy is adjusting.

It could have been much, much worse.

I hope my mother is sitting down for this one

Miss A's day began with this:

Mommy, my throat is sore.

It is?  Should we go back to bed?

Nope, I'm not going to throw up!

And ended with her cutting her own hair!

That's all I can say about it right now.

Zoning laws

Remember that episode of Everybody loves Raymond where Ray and Deborah learn they are expecting twins, and decide they want to buy a house, so Ray pulls out a map and begins to circle the zones, the safest-distances-from-family zones: the drop by unannounced zone, the overnight stay zone...remember that episode?

Our entire families live in the overnight stay zone. 

Though we have cultivated a pretty spectacular support system of friends in our little town, neither my husband nor I lived in Connecticut before his job relocated us a few years ago, and we have no family here.  In plenty of ways, the overnight stay zone is great: we don't have to struggle with the day to day bullshit stuff that we witness our friends dealing with because their drop by unannounced zone parent/sibling/cousin/ex-boyfriend's third wife is constantly materializing at the most unexpected, least convenient times.  We aren't required to attend weekly Sunday dinners, and we don't worry that we will open the local newspaper and read that a cousin was arrested for DWI, again.  The overnight stay zone offers us a protective bubble.

But, sometimes I don't want to live in a protective bubble.  Sometimes I want to meet my sister at a coffee shop for a quick visit or at the mall for some shoe shopping.  Sometimes I want to be able to drop my kids off at my parent's house so that S and I can have a night alone, and the girls can spend the night soaking up quality time with Grandma and Pop, eating too much ice-cream or potato chips and going to bed long past an acceptable bedtime.  Sometimes I want the holiday dinners to be at our house.

We are not traveling for Easter this year.  Miss H requested that we stay home.  She wants the bunny to come to her house, and we think it is a reasonable request.

Reasonable request, yes, but the decision to stay home, to not travel, was still difficult for us to reconcile; on the one hand, the trip seems natural. We do it because we've always done it.  We follow that familial pull "home" for the holidays.  A pull that continues to grow stronger because, while far from elderly, our parents certainly are not getting any younger, and neither are we.  We seem to have entered that stage of life when it seems more and more important to make sure we show up each year, when nothing seems as absolute, and the reality of how quickly things change creeps in with alarming regularity.

On the other hand, our girls are getting older too, and beginning to have opinions and ideas of their own.  Miss H is seven, to her this is her home, her familial pull tells her to dig her heels in and stay in Connecticut.  She wants the Easter Bunny to come to her own house.  How can we deny her that?  How many more bunny years does she have?  How much longer is she going to believe that a rabbit hops into our home each year distributing plastic eggs filled with coins and chocolate? 

So, we are not traveling this Easter.  In a couple of weeks, when school is closed for Spring break, I will take the girls to New York for a visit, but this Sunday they will be searching for eggs in their own back yard---which I wish wasn't so tightly encased in a protective bubble.