Last of the Mohicans

So last week the boy spents a few days at the mother in laws.  They had plans for the circus, a sleepover with his cousin (well ok, the husband’s step-father’s nephew – yeah, cousin) and a trip to the cinema. 

On Thursday morning the mother in law called.  She wanted to know what time the husband was leaving to pick the boy up and to let us know that she was taking the boys to the cinema and would then get the boy’s hair cut.  She called later in the morning to ask how we wanted the boy’s hair done.  He’s been saying for a while that he wants to grow it long (perhaps a little hero worship from Uncle B2 there) so we just asked for a trim.  The mother in law’s taken the boy to get his hair done quite a few times before, and now he’s grown out of the ‘I’m going to kick and scream and cry my way through this torture’ phase it always ends well.

So that afternoon the husband went off to pick up the boy.  He called me when he arrived to let me know he wouldn’t be back as quickly as he’d thought because they were still at the hairdressers.  I just put it down to typical Brasilian timing. 

And then he called.  He was sending through some pics of the boy’s new hair cut.  It turned out the sister in law had taken both him and his cousin to get their hair done.  The boy had seen a picture in a magazine and wanted his hair just like that.

I looked at the pictures.  My only possible response was “I’m going to fucking kill your sister.”

Because instead of the trim I’d been expecting, the boy was now sporting a mohican.  Complete with very shaved sides.  There was no getting away from this disaster without a set of hair trimmers and a very short blade.  Exactly what he said he didn’t want in the first place. 

What gets me is that a woman in her late twenties, a mother herself, can be quite so irresponsible.  With somebody else’s child.  She’d had her instructions, the request for a trim had been put in.  He’s five years old for crying out loud, he can’t make up his mind what he wants for breakfast each day, let alone what he wants his hair to look like for the next six weeks.  To allow a cut so different from what had been asked, and so unfixable in the first place is sheer madness to me.  If I was cruel I’d take my hair trimmers and run a stripe down the middle of her own daughter’s hair.  But I play nice with babies.

As for the boy, his hair hasn’t seen the desired hair gel since it was washed after he came home.  It looks marginally better flat but still fairly awful.  I’m waiting for a few weeks in the hope that his hair will see a growth spurt before I attack it with the trimmers.  In any event, I’ll be keeping cameras well away from him until that time.

And you know what, I bet the cousin’s mother was even less impressed than I am.

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