live from sublurbia

[Toast! Thing Of A Something Thursday!]

Haircuts. Oh, haircuts. Even though I’ve had my painful haircuts through the years and can sympathize with the long suffering Wolfie I didn’t really talk about how we got him from tears to laughter. While a lot of it was maturation on his part and doing a lot of roleplaying and just dealing with him being shaggy sometimes for months on end, we also put together a fun haircut kit for him to play with and work through his fears of getting a haircut.

I started out pretty simply: a bag to keep everything in (your standard looking shaving kit bag from a beauty supply shop ($5)) and filled it with a bunch of items usually found in a barber shop or haircut place. A lot like his great-grandfather’s kit, but without scissors that work.

I bought a simple hair drape at the same store ($7), a couple of combs ($3), a small spray bottle for water decorated with pictures of scissors ($2), a small unbreakable mirror ($1), a large makeup brush to dust away stray hair ($2), and an inexpensive brush ($2).

The last and hardest piece to find was scissors - I wanted scissors that he could handle, but that wouldn’t actually cut. He wasn’t old enough at the time I brought out the kit to actually use safety scissors, but we spent many hours sprinkled through the weeks talking about kid scissors, pretend scissors, and grown up scissors. The first few times our scissors were “hand made” - just our fingers “cutting” each other’s hair.

Scissors finally found their way into our bag after a trip to the dollar store. They had a clay and shapes kit, complete with plastic scissors that don’t cut, but open and shut in a satsifying way. As time went on, I also added bits of a play shaving kit I found at the store during the holiday season ($10). This had the added benefit of looking a lot like daddy’s shaving kit, and went a long way towards getting our boy in the chair and staying there.

The final piece we added to his kit a few weeks ago at his request. After a long discussion of what , specifically, he dislikes about haircuts in his own words, he came up with an answer. “Mommy,” he asked, “can you make me a mask that will keep the hair out of my eyes and mouth and nose?”

Aha. The hairspray mask. I’d seen them in Carol Wright catalogs growing up. A quick trip to the beauty supply shop and we had won the day. Five bucks later and we were done. Next haircut - and victory was his. Some squirming, some worrying, some wriggling, but his power of his mask and sheer will got him through it without a single tear. “I even laughed in the middle!” he exclaimed on the phone later to his dad. And his teachers the next day. And every parent that walked by his classroom (his class is held in an open room that also serves as a corridor to other parts of the school) for the next few days. That’s my boy. :D