I love taking my grandchildren anywhere – I love the expressions on their faces, I love watching them watching life go by. However the youngest is now at “that” age where there is really a sense of dread as you just know he is going to do the very thing you really don’t want him to do. What follows is my son’s account of taking them, all three, for a much needed haircut. It made me laugh out loud, I hope it does the same for you!
MO-vember
It was a cold evening as he stepped out of his car, his three little boys shivering and in tow. The pathway was lit by the refracted light coming through the condensation on the windows in the hairdressers.
“Oh God!” he said to himself. “What have I done?!”
He’d had a hard day at work. Too hard. And now, he had to take his hyperactive 2 year old…….for a haircut. He opened the door to the hairdressers and the bright light and perfumed air startled his senses. His two slightly older children bounded over to wait in their seats. His youngest gripped his leg menacingly. How will he get through the next hour? He knew there was no way that all three children would behave. It was just too much to ask. As he glanced to his left a sense of hope greeted him like a cool breeze on a stifling summers evening. Grandma was here. “She’ll know what to do!” he said to himself.
As Grandma rose from her chair, hair newly done, she smiled at the little darlings. She knew what to do alright!
“I’ve bought them some sweets to keep them quiet. Shall I take Eggbert home with me since he isn’t having his haircut?”
Conflicting feelings entered his tired, stressed out frame. She’s going but she’s taking one of them home with her. And there are sweets. Sweets to calm the hellion and imp.
The hairdressers sweet Lancashire brogue entered his ear canal, “who’s going first?” she said. “The youngest! Oh god the youngest! Let’s get this over and done with!”
He sat on the barber’s chair with this devil child, full of froth and mischief on his lap. The lady said something to him but his head was numb with “please be good…for the love of god please be good” meandering around his psyche like an ancient pagan chant.
She made some tentative snips. The child did not stir. He did not wriggle. No sound was heard. The child looked at himself in the mirror and made a porcine like noise from his nose. “Are you being a little piggy?” she enquired. The father just grinned nervously, willing the offspring to cause no transgression.
A clump of hair fell on the child’s lap and he offered it up to his mouth. “Don’t eat it!” his father said. The child offered it up to his father by way of a gift. His father, fearing he was being toyed with declined “no thank you!” And so it was for the next 20 long minutes. The child barely stirred. This left him, the father, unnerved. “What fresh hell has he stored up for me?” he asked himself.
Once the hairdresser put down her shears, his child slid off his lap and with a shimmering chorus of “awwwww…..doesn’t he look gorgeous!!!!” from the throng of maidenly patrons, the child wandered over to wait on a seat by the window.
The child’s father stood up and thanked the artisan for her patience even though he knew the little boy had been as timid as a field mouse. The eldest child stood and went to occupy the chair anew, the same look of terror and confusion adorned his face as his father. The boy walked past his father and glanced in to his eyes, both of them telepathically asking each other “have we got away with it?”
The imp was beginning to stir in his seat! “Ah!” his father thought. “This is much more familiar”. As many a parent is adept at doing, the man formed a strategy within a blink of an eye, to quieten the spirit of this scamp and scallywag. “I’ll give him the packet of dolly mixture his grandma left for him!”
And so………..he did.
The child sat and pulled out a singular sweet from the freshly opened packet. The sweets willing themselves to find their ultimate fulfilment by being eaten by an infant. The infant slowly began to oblige. One sweet became two, became four, became eight………..the father had become complacent. He had fallen in to that trap that snares so many a smug patron……..he had become complacent and dazzled by the bright screen on his communicative device known as an iPhone. He turned as a sticky hand reached for his toy of folly “no!” he yelped “you’ll make the screen all gooey!” Horror filled the fathers face! He noticed that the packet was empty aside from one solitary sweet. Half the packet occupied the boys mouth the other half (he couldn’t work out which half was minus the lonesome sweet but there really wasn’t time for that) was in the imps right hand! And is if to taunt, the rapscallion pulled the sweets from his mouth with his left hand and placed them back in the packet! There was sugary goo all around the boys’ mouth as he continued to place sweets in mouth, then back in packet, then in mouth, in a sick merry dance of stickiness the like of which had never been known in this establishment before!
Eventually, the sweets disappeared. It may be of small mercy, but thankfully the iPhone was spared finding sticky finger prints aloft its bright happy façade.
Suddenly with dread, a thought entered the old man’s matter “were those sweets sugar free?” He quickly snatched the packet from the impending youth. His eyes ravaged the writing looking for evidence. There was none of the sort he wanted, to be found. He looked over at the bubbling infant as if every misdeed had been held back for that moment!
The child sped off across the floor with the speed of a whippet. Knocking cans of hairspray, nail varnish, jumping on chairs, bumping in to ladies with sharp implements pointed at clients head. The child had absorbed every last grain of sugar as some sort of life force and it was as if a whirlwind had found itself within the confines of the hair boutique.
The father, with tears in his eyes, watched his child calm down. Relief struck him and reminded him that his child’s face was all sticky, and this was a hairdresser’s.
His child was laid prone of the floor. Freshly cut hair all matted and sweaty from the previous half hours exertion. He slowly turned the child over. Hair was found stuck to the child’s face all around his mouth. At that moment, the child had become a man. The sticky goo around his mouth had attracted hair from every corner of the hairdressers. The man looked at the child and recalled how he himself had spent the last two weeks looking like a prat all in the name of charity. And now, in a show of solidarity his child had empathized with him.
The trauma of the previous hour left him as his oldest child joined his side. The child looked at his father then his younger brother and tearfully said “he has a moustache! Just like you Daddy!”
Tearfully his father replied “Yes……..yes he does”. He turned to the lady behind the counter, all havoc lay waste behind her. He asked “can I book them in for next month………..?”
(for those who don’t know “MOVEMBER” is an organisation where gentlemen all over the world unite, by growing a mosutache for the whole month of November, and getting people to sponsor them to do so – all proceeds going to a Charity (Movember) specialising in raising awareness and funds for mens health issues, prostate cancer, testicular cancer etc – and yes my son is participating – if you would care to sponsor him you can find details here http://mobro.co/philbee1)
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