Because If You Don’t Look Good….

It turns out a bald man and a woman with very bad vision probably aren’t the ones who should be attempting group barbering.  But attempt we did last Saturday, and poor Owen was our victim!

The hair on the back of Owen’s head is basically normal, straight, thick hair, whereas on the top and sides, it is still wispy baby hair.  Over the past year, I’ve trimmed the back a few times, when it reached his collar and just became generally mullet-y.  I tried to cut it while he was paying attention to something else, since he doesn’t like the sound of scissors cutting his hair, but I could usually only do a few quick snips before he was on to me.

The problem became twofold:  first, because I was always just cutting the ends in the back, his hair was becoming a bowl cut with all the hair in the back the same length.  Second, most of the hair on the top of his head still won’t grow past the hairline, except for a few long strands that would look cute in a Mad Men kind of way when combed with a side part, but which would inevitably hang down past the short bits in spikes on his forehead.  Here’s an example:

So before Sean and I became a hairdresser tag-team, I attempted to cut off the spiky bits on top and make them even with the hairline fuzz.  But what I hadn’t realized is that then it would look like I had cut ALL his hair on top in tiny bangs that were less than 1/8^th of an inch.  In other words, Owen would look like a pocket-protector-wearing, full-fledged dork.  Like so:

Adorable, yes.  But nerdy haircut?  Also yes.  It was like bowl-cut meets monk-cut, and therefore something had to be done.  I enlisted Sean’s help, because he is very good with things requiring small eye/hand coordination.  But he has also worn his head shaved for years—perhaps even decades—so his haircutting scissor skills were a bit rusty.  He therefore first grabbed a hank of hair in the middle of the back of Owen’s head and hacked it off.  It looked horrible!  We both couldn’t stop laughing!  Poor Owen!  Sean tried to fix it up a bit, as I kept telling him to “cut it vertically!”, but poor Owen still looked like his hair had been cut by a four year-old sibling, or as Sean put it, by a one-toothed beaver.

We decided shorter was the only way to fix it and kept cutting and cutting until it didn’t look so bad.   Although I think that is really more a tribute to Owen’s cute face than to our mad skills.  Here is the finished product:

Not bad, but I think next time we’ll get a professional to do the cutting!