Daring Young Mom

If you wake up on a Saturday morning and your hair has been cut in a mullet, you just know. You don’t have to look in the mirror. You may not even need to run your fingers through your hair. You just feel different.

You may feel the need to play a couple of periods of hockey to get your blood circulating or maybe you just want to consume large amounts of pork rinds before scavenging for spare headlights in your front yard. Either way, you’ll know.

Because of my New Year’s resolution to spice up my hair-do, I excitedly accepted the offer to join Karli’s hosted haircutting hullabaloo with my favorite stylist. Katie periodically comes out to the home of a local mom and cuts/colors everyone’s hair while we watch each other’s kids. She’s awesome and charges a pittance when we get a group together.

My last cut was a damage control chop-job to cut down on the mental anguish caused by seeing large chunks of my hair fall to the shower floor each morning….that I showered.

So this time, I wanted to do something really fun. I decided I wanted my hair highlighted and cut to look something like this. What I really meant was that I wanted a team of stylists to come live at my house and make my hair look like this every morning.

As Katie was cutting away, she said, “I know you’re sort of a low maintenance hair person (understatement of the year) so I’m not cutting your hair exactly like that picture. If I did that, it would end up looking sort of like a mullet. I’ll make the layers a bit longer and give you fewer bangs.”

Ack! Bangs! Were those bangs in that picture? This was all too scary. Although there was no mirror in the kitchen, I closed my eyes for the remainder of the cut.

When she finished blow drying and styling, it actually looked pretty great, despite the fact that I was repeatedly blowing the sexy messy bang chunk out of my eyes, my lower lip extended.

Driving home, I had the thought, “I may never be able to make it look like this again. I should drive to all my friends’ houses to show them that it was a cute cut once.” I resisted the urge and I regret that decision.

As soon as I woke up this morning, scratching my hairy pot gut, I knew it. I now have a highlighted mullet.

I don’t blame the stylist. She tried to warn me and fix my mistake. I know she will see me through this. I think I mainly blame Liz for suggesting that I come up with resolutions this year.

It actually may be a very nice cut. I’m just not good at hair. I’m not good at doing it or having it, really, in anything but the most basic style.

At least the highlights don’t look like zebra stripes. They are my first and I will always be able to look back on them fondly.

The first time I got layers was not nearly so fortunate. My sister was using me as an experiment to learn how to cut layers and when she finished, I distinctly remember crying and bawling, “I look like David BOWIE… in Labyrinth!”

But that grew out. I suppose this will too. Until then, I’ve got me some monster-truck-rally tickets to buy.

Update: Karli has just promised to instruct me in the feminine art of hair care and styling. We shall see what kind of pupil I make.

I have an aunt who’s fighting hard to kick Cancer’s butt and send it home crying to its mother. She became my aunt when I married Dan 4 years ago and I instantly loved her. She just felt like my family. She is an encourager, a finder-outer, someone who wants to know everything that’s going on in your life and make you feel special – minus the sugar shock often associated with such people. Her killer sense of humor also helps.

Tonight I checked my cell phone messages while grocery shopping and there was a message from Aunt J, congratulating me on the success of my blog and telling me how proud she is that I am part of the family. She told me how much she loves me and how proud she has always been of me. To have a woman like her leave me that kind of a message brought tears to my eyes, in the grocery store. I guess she’s trying to send me home crying to my mother too.

I will never delete that message.

I have a few messages that have touched me in that way and I have saved them until a move or job-change has forced me to erase my entire inbox.

It got me thinking about all the talking, emailing and instant messaging I do every day. I send letters and thank-you notes by snail-mail as well. Words, words and more words are constantly spewing forth from the DYM.

I want to leave more messages that won’t ever be erased.

Correct that to read more fun.

I have some practice under my belt.

Elections for Grade 5 student body president. We write names on pieces of paper. The teacher counts them in her head (Jeff Probst could learn a thing or two about counting from Mrs. Rung) and then lets us know that I lose. So the boys didn’t like the pink frosting on my campaign cupcakes. Big dealy-o! The defeat is quick and nearly painless. Like a lip wax, just rip it off.

Senior Year of College. I’m up for a College of Fine Arts Award. We finalists embarrass ourselves in front of a panel of professors. They talk behind closed doors. A week later I get a runner-up thingy at an awards ceremony and proceed to take my date out for ice cream. We have no second date. I think he ran off with the winner.

Last night JT and his posse of BoB Award death marchers (a moment of silence to weep for their lost sleep and possibly lost minds) put up the official voting system on the site.

“Sweet,” says I. I will vote for my favorite blog.

I proceed to do so.

Up pops a results/body-count vote tally mechanism of death.

The silent scream.

The not-so-silent scream.

I say a quiet prayer that they will close the voting tomorrow. Watching these votes come in will be like watching my own demise…. in slow-motion…. on the internet…. in front of thousands of people.

Now, I’m not asking you to make me the Seabiscuit of the BoBs, but for the love of string cheese, please don’t leave little Katie out on the school ground getting her butt whipped with cupcake frosting smeared all over her hair, while thousands of 5th graders look on.

Basically, what I’m asking is that you don’t leave me hanging with one vote….cast by someone living in the greater Seattle area…..who shall not be named.

As my husband and Mr. Trump repeatedly remind us, “losing” in a contest of this
nature is not a loss, but a tenth-place finish in a large group of amazing contenders.

Yes.

And still I beg for mercy.

No problem, you can borrow my Ultimate Chopper. You may also borrow it to make babyfood, but it just doesn’t have the kahones to do spinach. Sorry.

This offer brought to you by late night feedings with Laylee, hours of infomercials, and a chef, yes, a chef – named Tony.

It was late. There was lactation, yawning, flickering blue light and a chef’s hat. I distinctly remember the chef’s hat. A small person was eating me and Dan sat stoically by my side.

The knives, the glorious knives.

Shining, chopping, slicing tomatoes, meat, steel pipes, sweater-vests, various pieces of metallic currency.

All for the low payment of $3.86 every fortnight for the next 13 years. The amazing deal that would only last for 10 more minutes. 9…..8……

I switched the channel.

Me: Those are lame.
Dan: (staring straight ahead) Yeah.
Me: But they make them look kind of great.
Dan: Yeah.
Me: So manipulative.
Dan: (casually) I have the 800-number memorized.

This started a chain of events, now beyond our control. Chef Tony knives and other kitchen apparati grace the kitchens of several family members and friends.

I can now puree a brick….but again, not so much with the spinach.

Congratulations, interrogations, this, this, and now “The Twinge” is back.

But, I like you all. I’m just skeered, and I don’t have much info yet. Peace, yo!

It’s elementary, my dear Daring One, but you will need to wait 90 minutes to be seen.

Rumor has it that a new Peds office is going up 3 inches from my front door sometime in the next 3 days to 10 years (the grapevine is amazingly inaccurate, I find). So I wanted to check out the doctor who is rumored to be moving here.

Magoo’s had a cough for 2 months, so I thought, “That’s a good excuse to see this guy. What the heidi-hay? Why not spend an hour in a germ-infested flu chamber?”

Scene:

In the waiting room, a poor lady loses her marbles. She’s pulled her kid out of school, gotten a babysitter for the others and she’s been waiting forever. It turns out they double-booked the doctor and we are scheduled to go in at the same time.

She calls someone on her cell phone and freaks out.
She talks to the receptionist.
I try to lighten the mood. I guess I’m not that funny.
She calls someone on her cell phone and freaks out.
She talks to the receptionist – LOUDLY.
We all feel bad for her but….WOW!
She calls someone on her cell phone and refers to me, saying something like, “Of course SHE’S not freaking out. Back in the days when I just had little kids at home, I could spend all day in the doctor’s office and it would be no big deal.”

(This is funny. I guess now SHE has a life or something. Phew! I’m sure glad I don’t.)

I’m actually not freaking out because it won’t change anything, people are giving the marble-less one crazy cukoo-eyed looks, my kids are enjoying the fish tank, and I feel strangely that I’m getting my comeuppance for my tardy laster-time at the doctor’s office.

This is a different doctor, a different office, and a different practice, but aren’t they all somehow in cahoots? If they put a big fat red flag on my file in one office, I bet alarms are going off in doctors’ offices all over the state when they see my number on the caller ID. This woman is a late-ish person who must be punished. And so I wait.

After an hour and a half, they call me back first, even though babysitter-can’t-keep-the-kids-anymore-her-daughter-is-missing-phonics-cell-phone lady arrived before me. Her mouth flops open and she makes a sound like, “Gahgk!” and shakes her head. I beg for mercy. I beg them to take her back first.

She softens, her face returns to normalish and she tells me it’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for her. That is sad.

The reception staff and the entire lobby (seriously, the fish and furniture included) breathe a collective sigh of relief.

I think the doctor, who turned out to be a freaky-genius mastermind of medicine, apologized approximately 43 times for the wait and proceeded to pace back and forth asking questions about my family and the state of our health.

The interview ended with a pause, a clasping of hands and then, “I have a theory, and if you’ll permit me to look in your daughter’s ears, I predict that her round of antibiotics has not worked, that her ear infection is still there and that your son and husband (not present) have sinus infections.”

By Jove, he was right!

As I left, the nurse thanked me for my patient’s patience and laughed that they would put a gold star on my chart. I stopped dead in my tracks. “No. Seriously. Please put a gold star on my chart. It would mean a great deal to me.”

She could tell I meant it.

She said she would.

I will be checking.