Our son's first haircut

“Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him.
Children born to a young man are like sharp arrows in a warrior’s hand.”
Psalm 127: 3 & 4

Today’s post will be on a lighter subject. No infertility and its many causes and certainly no miscarriages. After all, who likes to talk about things like these all of the time. A light moment can be so welcoming when everything else seem to be going awry. I do trust my infertile readers won’t think that I am insensitive for writing this post as we are still in the honeymoon stage of parenting.

One Saturday morning, about two weeks ago, we had just had breakfast and felt we had the energy to take on our son to cut his finger nails, even though he was not sleeping. You must have remembered me mentioning that he does not allow us to cut his nails unless he is sleeping. After all, they were looking like he was being raised by wolves. Turns out he does not really want us to do anything to him, this includes brushing his teeth, combing his hair, changing his diapers, he always put up a fight. Cutting his fingernails started out promising but we soon realized that even though it was the two of us against him, we were still no match for him. (I wonder what they are putting in the children’s formulae these days, they are so strong). We managed to get to the third finger nail and when we could not go on, a bright idea struck me, why not try to cut his hair instead, which along with the long finger nails, did appear as if he was truly being grown in the wild. My husband often said he looked like the cartoon character of John Lithgow in the movie, ‘The Incredibles,’ who has ‘spikey’ hair.

I must say some days, I like the wild hair on him but other days, it is just simply difficult to deal with. This attempt started out promising also, as my husband managed to get the excess hair off rather quickly and the haircut began taking shape soon after. Things quickly got ugly however, as he started to cry as if we were abusing him. He also began sweating profusely and soon he had hair all over his face, in his mouth, in his eyes and was on his back on the ground. We accepted defeat, at least for the moment, gave him a bath and he went to sleep.

When he awoke, we fed him and made our second attempt, this time hoping that the bath and nap would have calmed him a bit. We tried to get it right this time by putting him in a high chair outside at the back of our house. The afternoon was so lovely with a gentle caribbean breeze blowing and birds flying all about and chirping happily in the trees. This was a brilliant idea we thought because he love the outdoors and the ‘birdies.’ We began the task again and soon he began protesting so my husband had to hurry to get it done before he was on the ground again. Not long afterwards we accepted our second defeat this time feeling very guilty because the haircut actually was looking worse than the first attempt.

The next day, he fell asleep in my arms. As I stared at how calm and defenseless he was sleeping, the idea struck me, why not finish the job when he is asleep (hmmm, the bible story of Sampson who had his hair cut by Delilah while he fell asleep in her lap comes to mind. The only difference is, Sampson lost his strength when his hair was cut, my son’s strength seemed to have increased).

Then and only then did we truly complete the task. We felt we could slap ourselves, why didn’t we think of this before? Cut his hair while he was asleep.

We certainly learnt our lesson and next time we will surely get it right. He looks so cute and boyish with his new haircut, we can’t stop staring at him we have taken so many pictures and will be sending some off to family members who cannot wait to see this new look. It was truly worth the war.

I trust you enjoyed the little time away from infertility.

Until next time, keep clinging to hope