“Is that a wig under the table?” my wife asked.It’s sort of an unusual question, especially since we were in the kitchen and we don’t ordinarily keep our wigs under the kitchen table. Before I could come up with any logical explanation why a wig might be hiding out among the various food crumbs my messy-eater kids dispatched to the floor, my wife clarified her question.“Is that hair?”“What is she talking about?” I said to myself, but only to myself because my wife had a tone of voice that implied, “Things are not going to go well if you ask me a dumb question right now.”Luckily, my wife discovered the answer to that question as soon as she reached under the table and retrieved the ball of whatever. And before I could utter something moronic—like “Is it?”—she yelled for our four-year-old daughter.“Did you cut your hair?” Silence. “Answer me! Did you cut your hair?” Silence again, followed by the cutest stinking shrug of the shoulders I ever did see.This is the tipping point of every parental encounter where things are going to go one of two ways. Either my daughter is going to start wailing and be so overcome by tears and snot that we won’t be able to understand a word she says, or she’s going to be silent and a CIA interrogator couldn’t even waterboard an answer out of her.But before that, my wife—having used her Sherlock Holmes-like investigative abilities to figure out that she did cut her hair—asked her, “Why did you cut your hair?”Miraculously, neither of the previous two things happened. Instead, a third thing happened. My cute-as-a-button four year old daughter said something completely logical: “It was in the way, and I didn’t like it, so I cut it off.”
But of course.If we weren’t careful here this young lass might just convince us that she’d done nothing wrong. Why were we questioning her logical, self-executed solution to a problem she encountered?My wife wasn’t swayed though. She sent our daughter to her room, and looked at the pile of hair she held in her hand in disbelief.“When did she do this?” my wife asked me. Oh crap! I was in charge for a couple of hours, and since my daughter had a full head of hair when my wife last saw her, it’s a reasonable question.Unfortunately, I had no answer.I tried to think back over the previous hour or two, and nothing stood out as the moment during which my daughter could have gone all Vidal Sassoon in the kitchen. It seemed like a question that I should be able to answer, but instead all I could muster was a pathetic, “I don’t know.”My wife had been on her way out the door before the Great Hair Discovery, so she left. A few minutes later, the phone rang.“It’s actually kinda funny,” she said when I answered. “She gave herself her first haircut. And her hair can’t be too bad since we didn’t even notice it.”I agreed. I thought it was funny, too, but I’m smart enough to let a few minutes pass before trying to point out the humor in a situation to an angry mom.My daughter has never had her hair cut. My wife has been asking her for more than a year if she wanted to go for a haircut. The answer had always been an emphatic “No!” Turns out, all she had to do was wait for a day when her hair was in the way.Now I think maybe it’s time to call Hair Cuttery and see if they’re hiring. I’ve got a four year old who appears to be a hair cutting expert. Might as well put her passion to good use and make her start earning her keep!Read how this all went down from my daughter's point-of-view here.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Hey, did you like reading this? If so, you should Share it on Facebook so you can bring joy to others. You can also find tons of other posts by me here. And you can like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.
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