Friday Freebies: Haircuts

I started cutting my sweetie’s hair before we were married and I’m happy to say that no one has cut his hair since. He seems very happy with my services, but my kids…not so much. When Bossy was little she actually wanted a mullet. (Although she is in denial about this fact and says she remembers something about the Gym Rat spitting gum in her hair?)  Billy Ray Cyrus was in his heyday and both boys and girls wanted to copy that style. 

Billy Ray and Bossy

Once when the Gym Rat was about 8 years old I tried to get the shaved look on the back of his neck without a razor. What a disaster! He went to school that day (of course, he couldn’t see the back of his neck) and he came home in tears. Some of the kids had laughed at his goofy haircut. So even on our very tight budget, I scraped up some grocery money and took him somewhere to get it fixed. 

My girls were laughing about a Family Home Evening we had when Bossy was about 15 where I "taught" the kids to cut each other’s hair. I’m not recommending this activity unless you have plenty of money to take them all to the salon to get them fixed. Oh yeah, and make sure it’s summer so they don’t have school the next day. (Actually it wasn’t that bad…my kids were very careful because they knew that they were next in line.) So they all breathed a sigh of relief when we started getting these amazingly cool e-mails from the Supercuts training studio every couple of weeks. They invite us over for free haircuts! By now you know me well enough to know that I have a hard time turning down anything that’s free. 

So every couple of months I gather up the kids and we drive for about 20 minutes and then entertain ourselves in the waiting room until it is time for us to get that free makeover. We have been attending this class for about ten years now and we are hardly ever disappointed with the results. It seems that Supercuts retrains every new stylist that joins their company even if they have 20 years in the business, and they do these classes all over the US. 

One Thursday night, Princess and Prima Donna were playing quietly in their room. Princess was about six and Prima Donna around four. The fact that they were so quiet should have given me a clue, but I was helping the older kids with homework and completely oblivious. Eventually the two girls presented themselves. Princess was carrying a pair of scissors, and Prima Donna was sporting a new haircut. She was totally chopped! I don’t think a single hair on her head was longer than an inch and a half. Not that they were uniform by any stretch. I tried not to come unglued but I was losing it fast. The only thing that kept me sane at all was the fact that we had already planned to attend free haircuts the following day. 

When we showed up at the studio, Melissa, the lady in charge, started laughing. "Who did it?" she chuckled. Our very quiet and shy Princess was not about to confess, but she did blush a nice shade of pink. "We’ll do our best, but no promises," Melissa added. "This is going to take months to grow out." Princess watched rather anxiously as they carefully trimmed Prima Donna’s hair to a more uniform length. They didn’t want to take off much because she was nearly bald in some places already. Prima Donna took it all in stride…what was a little hair? It would grow back. After they had finished shaping her hair into an extremely short pixie cut, I did something that was either totally brilliant or extremely mean; I’m still not sure which. I had them put Princess in the chair and give her the exact same haircut.

Masks added to protect the "innocent."