Milestones tend to vary between children.
For example, Ellie still struggles with nighttime potty
training whereas her cousin has been 100% potty trained for at least a year.
One can also consider how at Ethan's age, Ellie was a regular chatterbox with a
pretty wide vocabulary. That doesn't mean that Ethan is slow by any means. It
just means that Ellie surpassed him in that area. Ethan, however, began to walk
and crawl long before his older sister did.
Of course, there is one major milestone that is always going
to be different between boys and girls. The one to which I am referring is the
first haircut. For Ellie, she's still waiting on that day to arrive. For Ethan
though, that day finally arrived ten days ago on June 13. Sorry that I'm just
now getting around to writing about it.
For the longest time, Bethany and I were extremely hesitant
to cut Ethan's locks. For one thing, it was pretty cute to see the way they
flowed all over the back of his head. They simultaneously had the ability to
make us both laugh and say "Awww!" Unfortunately, they were becoming
a nuisance to the little man as the way the curls stuck out from the side of
his head made him look like some kind of mad scientist. They also made it so
Ethan's hair was constantly a sweaty mess in the hot summer temperatures.
Taking all of those things into account, Bethany and I finally decided the time
had come for Ethan to get his first haircut. However, a simple trip to the
barber wouldn't be in store for young Ethan. Instead, we were going to cut his
hair ourselves!
Here's the point of the story where you can stop worrying
about us using a sharp pair of Fiskars scissors on our baby's hair as that
didn't happen. After all, we didn't want him to lose an ear or anything.
Instead, we purchased a set of Wahl hair clippers complete with guards to keep
us from cutting too short. Our reason for going this route was simple. For at
least the next five or six years, Ethan won't care what his hair looks like at
all. Therefore, as long as we can competently cut it and make it look nice,
everything should be fine.
Once the big day arrived, we stripped Ethan's shirt off and
placed him in a Bumpo seat sitting on one of our kitchen chairs. We also took a
set of pictures so that we could remember both the before and after looks.
After snapping the largest guard onto the clippers, I flipped on the unit and held
it out for Ethan to touch and get accustomed to. For his part, he really didn't
care anything about the clippers as he was much more interested in the cartoons
we had pulled up on the iPad to distract him with.
Finally, the time had come. I gently lifted up the back
curls and proceeded to run the clippers through the locks. As they fell to the
ground, one-by-one, I was amazed first by just how much hair there was on our
floor. Secondly, I was amazed by how cute the little man looked. If anything,
his long hair had looked worse than we realized.
As I finished up Ethan's first haircut, Bethany and I were
in agreement that he looked great. There was only one thing left to do and that
was to commemorate the moment. First we snapped a pair of after shots. Then,
the final step was to pick up some of the largest curls of hair to place in a
Ziploc bag with the date on the front for safe keeping. After all, the nostalgic
in me wants to be able to remember everything about our son's first haircut and
look back and smile. Cute, right? #DaddyWrite
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