Tantrums

I started this some time ago and don't now remember where I was going with it. It did give me a bit of a chuckle to find it in my drafts today.

We have all seen this marvelous spoof on sleep advice, right?

Well....

Send your child to their room but never let them cry alone.
Spare the rod and spoil the child but spanking will give them brain damage and permanently impair their emotional health.
A child having a tantrum just really needs a little more attention to feel secure. Giving a tantruming child attention rewards the behavior and they will never stop having tantrums.
A child needs to feel free to explore their emotions in a safe and secure environment. If you give them an opportunity to express their emotions, they will never learn to manage them.
If you discipline a child for throwing a tantrum properly, they won't have them anymore. Children do not have the emotional maturity to stop having tantrums until they reach adolescence.

And above all, be consistent.

The MOB walk of shame

I do know that there is another, less savory meaning for the phrase but it also seemed appropriate here. I mean that walk into a hair salon with your little boy whose home haircut has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

It was a perfectly legitimate idea in the beginning. I've cut Peter's hair a couple of times with scissors and had no trouble making it look just fine. For this latest round, I decided that it was time for it to be a little shorter, a little more toddler-like so it was time to bring out the trimmer for the back and around the ears. I had been asking Jonathan for a couple of weeks to show me how to use it but we hadn't gotten around to looking at it together. After a couple of online tutorials, one day I hit the point of fix-this-now-before-I-go-crazy and thought, "how hard can this be to figure out, really?"

It started out well. The trimmer was fully charged, the adjustable length guard was easy to find and install and Peter was intrigued by the sound but was reasonably cooperative with sitting on the table looking at books. The first part went just fine. But just as I pulled the trimmer away to check my work, the guard slipped a little and, woops, there was a patch that was a little shorter than the rest. No big deal, I thought, I'll just camouflage it when I do the rest and be more careful with the guard position on the trimmer. Turns out, like that first wobble of an unstable ladder that sensible people pay attention to so that they don't break their necks by continuing on, that was just the first warning from the trimmer that all might not proceed as planned. As I continued with the shearing, the guard slipped again and then again, this time leaving a bare patch that no amount of tweaking was going to minimize. In desperation, I switched to the scissors, cutting the top and sides in the previously acceptable fashion. That part wasn't too bad but I found it nearly impossible to blend with the uneven back. Finally, in tears, I had to lay down the tools and admit defeat. It wasn't just the funky-looking, yep, mom did it look, that I was willing to have as the price for the learning curve with the new technique. I didn't think that I could stand to take him out in public.

So we loaded up for the nearest salon (such a ridiculously fancy word for a simple place) and trooped off for the trim that hopefully would deal with the mess, bracing myself for the mockery of the stylists. They were nice enough about it, giving him as good a cut as they could with what I had left and waiting until after I left to laugh at me, per my request. I couldn't show the enthusiasm that I think they were hoping for but at least it did look better than before.

It really is awfully short but I have confidence that at least it will grow out evenly from this point. And we are going to be investing in a proper, fully functional, trimmer set for the future.

My sheared lamb: