I’ll admit Baboo’s hair makes him look like a teensy rock star. (You’ll have to take my word on this since I don’t post photos of him here.) It’s long, but not quite long enough to stay tucked behind his ears. So I put a bobby pin in one side (he wears a deep side part). Then I spend the day putting the pin back in whenever it slips or he pulls it out. Which is at least a dozen times a day. I’d count, but that would be inviting madness.
And let me tell you: He does not like having that thing put in. I swear I’m very careful not to poke him, but if he sees it coming, he starts kvetching up a storm. So I often swoop down on him from behind and sneak the pin back in just after I set a few Cheerios on his high chair tray.
Then there’s the combing, which happens at least twice a day. Baby hair, if you are unfamiliar, is very fine and therefore prone to tangling, especially during naps and overnight. Because babies do a lot of physical work to go to sleep, or at least mine does. He tosses himself about getting comfortable and then he rolls around and smooshes his little face into the mattress until it’s time to get up. And if he has a cold, guess what’s in his hair when he wakes up? BOOGERS! That are also stuck to his face! And his hair!
I can hear you all thinking: Give that baby a haircut, you silly woman! I’ve been dying to, for months. But we are adhering to a Hindu tradition of not cutting the baby’s hair until he’s 11 months old. Happily, that milestone is less than two weeks away, and you can bet your boots I’ll be writing about the blessed event in this space.
Until then, though, I’m on hair wrangling duty. And doing my best to convince the baby that his name is not, “Look at that hair!”
“Teensy rock star”, ha!!
I was thisclose to making him be the Beebs for Halloween. Either that or Dracula, since he only had his eye teeth up top. Imagine the tiny, red-satin-lined cape!
Slacker! Jewish tradition forbids a boy to have a haircut until he is 3 (count ’em!) years old.
P.S. You don’t *really* have to comb his hair, you know. 😉
And ancient Polish tradition says you wait until 7 — at which point the boy is officially recognized as a son, making you wonder how one would refer to him prior to that.
Does the Jewish boy haircut prohibition have anything to do with past lives? That’s the case in Hinduism…
Dreadlocks are gross, even on babies. ;P
[…] the four or five months I had to deal with the baby’s increasingly unruly hair. Here’s the kvetchitude post on that in case you missed […]