Then and Now...

Of my three children, Darcy (the oldest) was by far the strongest willed and most stubborn. She was the best behaved (by and large) as a toddler/young child...but that was only because I was ten times more strict when she was little than I am now. We had many memorable battles of the will...but one that I can finally look laughingly back upon was her compulsion to cut her own hair...EVERY NEW YEAR'S DAY. She did it when she was two, three, and again when she was four (as can be seen in this picture). In all, she cut her own hair about five times...but three of those times were on successive New Year's...it was uncanny. I, of course, went ballistic each time she gave herself another Mohawk...not that it did much good...looking back now, I think it was wasted trauma for both of us!

I finally discovered that it WASN'T that she had a desire for short hair (I had always pleaded with her, "TELL Mommy if you want your hair cut and Mommy will take you to a BEAUTICIAN to do it!") The problem was that she didn't WANT short hair so there was no need to ever warn me before she took the scissors to her own head. What she wanted was to STYLE her own hair. And, after putting it in some semblance of a pony-tail, she would just cut off anything that didn't get caught up into the pony tail, to make the finished effect look neater! This, resulted with uncanny regularity in a rather classic Mohawk cut. In the photo above, you can see the results of her last Mohawk slowly growing out! Who would have believed the child's hair would now be down to her upper thighs?


(*And before my DAUGHTER objects and informs me that this post does not qualify for "Every Day in May" because I took that photo of her LAST month...let me explain! This post qualifies as my creative endeavor for today, not because it is a new photo, but because it is a newly journaled story! I hadn't chronicled this particular STORY before! Besides, today, I made individualized buttons to link to each other the other participating blogs and that took a bit of creativity!)