I Went to Sleep With Gum in my Mouth and Now There's Gum in My Hair, and I Could Tell: It Was Going to be a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

So Lea says to me (she says), "Mom, I think there's gum in my hair."

Her panic begins to escalate as she realizes that this is indeed true.

"How did you get gum in your hair?"

"I don't know. There was no gum in my room. I didn't have any gum. There was no gum anywhere. But I went to bed with clean hair and I woke up with gum in my hair."

"You realize that's impossible and doesn't make any sense... "

"It just got there and now I need you to GET IT OUT!!!!!"

She approaches me with scissors in hand.

The last time I touched her hair with scissors resulted in the micro-bang incident. We shan't speak of it...

So we went to the hairdressers and this is what she came home with:



Talk about making lemonade out of lemons...

Not our first haircut related incident that's had a happy ending. (I told you not to mention the micro-bangs...)

When Olivia was getting ready to start pre-school she had long beautiful hair. She very much enjoyed tossing it around. She also wore dresses every. day. Anyone who knows Liv now knows - well - she still has pretty hair...

Several days short of that first day of preschool, Lea and Liv were playing beauty parlor and with one snip of the safety scissors, Liv had a nice chunk of hair cut to cheek length. I took her to the salon, all three of us may or may not have been crying, and said, "fix it". She left with an adorable bob that made her hair look even thicker. It was beautiful. And she hated it.

She was still at an age when a great deal of her gender identification dealt with hair and dress and she was pretty much convinced that now that her hair was short she would have to be a boy. And she liked being a girl and didn't want to be a boy and now no girls would want to play with her anymore because girls don't like to play with boys.

She cried intermittently until that first day of school.

When she came home that first afternoon, she was beaming. (Insert spiritual leader of your choice here) was smiling on me, because Liv's teacher that year was a very attractive young lady with a super-short pixie cut. Without saying a word, she restored my daughters sense of femininity and the short hair was never mentioned again, not even once.