The Big Haircut and the Doughnuts

Quick story here about Perritt's second real haircut. Over the past 2 years we've given him small haircuts from time to time but he only recently started going to the barber shop with me. The first time, we went to Danny's Barber Shop here in Sandy Springs. It's not really named Danny's, but I'll keep it as Danny's to protect the innocent. You'll see why later.

In any case, because I wasn't sure how he would react at the barber shop, I cut him a deal. Go to the barber shop and after we get our haircut, we'll go to the Dunkin Donuts next door and get a doughnut. I knew I was making a long-term deal here, but I also love doughnuts, so it wasn't a punitive commitment. Regardless , he was sold. "Go barba shop. Then get speshus (special) treat"


So the first time we went there, we got our haircut by a gentlemanly barber named Frank. He did a good job with my hair and just did a little cutting on Perritt's hair, just enough to get him familiar with the concept of getting a haircut. It was a great experience capped off with a delicious powdered doughnut. There's nothing like sitting at the doughnut shop with your little buddy having a powdered doughnut and an orange juice.


Since it was such a great experience, a few weeks later we went back to get our hair cut by Frank. Unfortunately, Fank wasn't there. It was just Danny. As in Danny's Barber Shop. See, this wasn't ideal because the reason we went to Frank the first time was because I've had my hair cut by Danny before. I didn't like it. It was too short and just didn't wear well.

But Danny is a fixture in Atlanta. He's been cutting hair for nearly 50 years years. He's an old-time barber and this is an old-time barber shop. It's *his* shop. So even though I had a bad experience with him before, I thought it must have been a fluke. No one can stay in business that long if they aren't good at what they do. Or so the thinking went.

In any case, we get there and we sit right down. I get my haircut and Perritt is already talking about his doughnut. This lets me know that we've sort of got a limited amount of time here before Perritt gets antsy. I know this. Danny does not. So while my haircut is going alright, Danny is almost literally telling me the history of how he learned to cut hair. The people he used to cut hair with. The different techniques. It's like hearing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire being read to you. Only about hair. All the while, Perritt's getting more and more adventurous. He's climbing on things, playing with shampoos, combs. I'm doing the best I can do to keep him focused, but it's not really all that effective. And all the while, Danny is just keeping up the history lesson.


And sure, there's a lot of charm to that sort of thing, but you know, there's only so much time for that nostalgia when you have a 2 year old with you. 28 minutes later, I'm done. So it's Perritt's turn but I know that this won't take too long. Mostly it should be a quick affair. Just go through the motions. We don't really need a major haircut. Just a little trim.


Again, I know this. Danny does not.


So round and round he goes, trimming Perritt's hair. And Perritt's being good but this is going on and on. Perritt's just sort of sitting there, but sometimes he turns his head a little too fast. One of the times he does this, Danny clips a hole in his bangs. This is going south in a hurry. After what turns out to be an additional 15 minutes and more history lessons, he finally he gets to the end of the haircut and Perritt's looking a lot less like his old self. His long hair is gone. He looks like a boy. A boy with a pretty awful haircut but a boy all the same.


Luckily, Perritt doesn't care about his bad haircut. When he's done, he gets down, and says "Speshous treat now?" So I get ready to go and I ask Danny how much I owe him. He points at me and says $14 for me and then points at Perritt and says it's $14 for him. And I'm sort of surprised because last time Frank didn't charge for Perritt. I'm happy to pay but I'm thinking this should be a discounted cut at least. Not that he didn't cut enough hair, boy did he ever, but it was an awful haircut and he's 2 years old. I'm wondering why there isn't some gradation here.


Anyway, I don't really have a choice, so I pay him and we leave. As we're leaving though Perritt's talking about his doughnut again. He looks up at me and, totally unsolicited, says "May Poo like doughnut too?" And I look down at him and his awful haircut and say "Sure. What kind of doughnut do you think she would like." He pauses for a moment and then responds with "Pink one."


So we go to Dunkin Donuts and get a powdered doughnt for him and a pink doughnut for Mary Poole. While I'm sure we won't be going to Danny again for a haircut, I'm already looking forward to getting my next doughnut with Perritt after our next haircut wherever that may be.


It may be a while though. His hair is going to have to grow out a lot.

Carpool and The Grass Seed Fight

While we technically have another month of fall left, this time of year never really feels like fall to me. Sure, when the wind blows, it still looks like it's raining leaves most days, but football is wrapping up, the weather is taking a decidedly colder turn and Thanksgiving and Christmas are on everyone's minds. So as we enter the final month here, I thought I'd close up with one more post on some events that seem like so long ago, but which just happened at the beginning of fall.

Big Steps
When Mary Poole and Perritt were in pre-school last year, we'd walk them into the church and all the way to their room, which was in the interior of the church. Toward the end of that walk, there is a set of stairs that all of the older kids have to walk down on their own. We looked at that set of stairs and we thought to ourselves - "Will our kids be able to do that in a year? "Such a steep set of stairs. Carrying a little bookbag. It just didn't look doable. We imagined Mary Poole and Perritt going down the ramp that was beside the stairs while the rest of their class went down the stairs. But then of course, over the course of the next year, Mary Poole and Perritt got more practice than they'd ever need on our basement stairs. By the time school started, they were old pros.

But then there was the carpool. Given Perritt and Mary Poole penchant for being a little on the conservative side, it just didn't seem likely they'd be at all interested in being dropped aoff nd led into school by mothers and teachers they weren't all that familiar with, even if they did see them around the church. We just knew this was going to be a problem.

Fast forward to this year and the school has just opened its new preschool, which made a previously long walk much more daunting. Now with a new carpool lane and a walk to class the extended all the way through the new preschool, our children's Tuesday/Thursday morning walk was considerably more challenging.

To us.

The first morning of preschool, we got in the carpool lane with all the other parents. And while we're normally big advocates of the "let's talk it over ahead of time to get them ready for X" approach, this time, we just didn't say anything. We just knew that if we said anything to either of them along the lines of "Now when we get up there, Mommy and Daddy are going to stay in the car and you're going to go in all by yourself"we'd be risking Mary Poole wimpering, sucking her thumb for a little while and then melting down when the door opened. So we just waited until right before we were about to let them out to prep them. There was mild concern, which was allayed by us unbuckling their carseat straps.

Then it's our turn.

The door opens and we're in luck. It's one of their teachers: Mrs. Melissa. Perritt and Mary Poole love Miss Melissa, who teaches them movement. Both of them get out slowly, sling their bookbags over their shoulder and hold Miss Melissa's hands as they walk down the breezeway.

We drive off to keep the line moving and we catch the slightest bit of concerned look from Perritt but then he turns, looks up at Miss Melissa, starts walking again and launches into what appears to be a pretty good conversation, probably something like "Mommy, Daddy come right back later." And Mary Poole is sort of looking at her shoes as she's walking which was probably the preface to some comment to Miss Melissa like "Mary Poole shoes so pretty." She likes compliments.

But LeeAnn and I don't drive all the way off, we sort of park our car where we can watch them walk in for a second. We get a couple of glances but I'm not sure if they were looking at us or just looking around. After all, we were a good ways away. But we watched them all the way into the school and there was no crying, no melting down, nothing eventful. Just our two little ones being grown ups going to school all by themselves.

It's hard to believe we once worried about them handling stairs.

Grass seed fight
One of my absolute least favorite things about fall (right after picking up 1,391,220 leaves) is reseeding our fescue lawn. It's just a huge pain, compounded by the fact that it just doesn't seem to ever do any good. Come July, my yard is always in just awful shape from the heat. So it's a labor of spited love every year. I do it knowing my yard will never love me back.

This year I had some help from Perritt and Mary Poole though. They saw daddy out in the rain tilling up the bare patches, spreading some starter fertilizer and raking until he got blisters on his hands and they wanted in. So when it came time to spread the grass seed, they helped. We got them some buckets and I showed them how to cast grass seed by hand.

They sort of got it. Kind of. I would show them a bare spot where the seed needed to go and they would throw some out. A lot of it out. Like the seed covered the entire bare patch an eighth of an inch thick. Toward the end though, it devolved into a grass seed fight. Perritt threw some on Mary Poole. Mary Poole threw some on Perritt. Then Perritt realized he got the most laughs by literally dumping his bucket on himself. He was covered in it.

So this story isn't hysterically funny in and of itself, but I mention in it because it just shows how much effect children can have on heretofore miserable experiences. I'm sure I'll reseed the lawn next year (despite my annual threats to sod the whole yard with Bermuda or Zoysia) but next time I'll have some good memories to make the experience a little more enjoyable.

That's pretty much it for fall posts. We're a few days from Thanksgiving and then it's a downhill race to Christmas. Before you know it we'll be planning their third birthday. But fall will always have a special place in my heart, even if it goes more quickly than I ever remembered it passing in my youth.

The Changing of the Guard

We're just about at the end of the fall leaf season here in Atlanta. As noted before, it's a great time of year - my favorite. I haven't been in years but when I was in college I would often travel up from Clemson to the Western North Carolina mountains to see the mountains all afire and hike a mountain or two or just drive around. As everyone knows though, timing is everything. Go too early or wait too long and you miss the show. It just seems to go so quickly every year.

Mary Poole and Perritt are a lot like that these days. Vestiges of their years and months as infants are seemingly disappearing daily. There hasn't been anything quite as noticeable as the passing of the paci though, with the exception of potty training, which is underway.

In any case, back to the paci. So over the months and years LeeAnn and I have been really delinquent in instituting a forceful separation of Perritt from his best friend. We just knew it was going to be ugly and we just couldn't bear to do it to the boy. He's just so sweet and nice. We didn't think his heart could take it. Going to the pediatrician for checkups had been uncomfortable because we knew the question would come up. "Anyone using a paci or bottle still?" Awkward silence. "Just one. A paci." And then we'd sort of glance sideways-like and point to Sir. Meanwhile he'd just be sitting there looking at us like "What?"

But you know, we could handle the pediatrician. We knew that if the doctor just knew how sweet Perritt was he would agree there was no harm in his paci friendship. Plus, he only used it for naps and bedtime. Plus we didn't really have any appetite for spending two nights not sleeping because of the crying when you forced a paci intervention.Layer in the fact that we could still sort of pass the twins off as our "babies" because of his paci and there just wasn't a lot of impetus to make this move.

But the day came and we had to pull the trigger. We just had to try. So we did. The first night we asked him, "Hey Perritt, do you think we can just leave your paci here tonight" and we set the paci on top of his crib. He thought about it, looked at the paci, looked at us, clearly wise to our plan and took it down and put it in the crib and said "Just right dare." We put it back on top and said, "How about here. You can still have it, but it'll be right here". He looked at us again and went through some mental negotiations and decided that this agreement was ok, but that he wanted 2 pacis, probably in case one of them fell off. So we complied. Two pacis up on top (not one will drop).

Going in later that night, we found one paci was in his mouth and the other one on the floor. Prescient little tike. But we had failed we thought. But when we went in the next morning, it was back up on the top of the crib. Bubby had remembered the request and put it right back. So we knew he was trying.

So that night we tried again. The same thing - two pacis up on top - only when we went in later that night, he didn't have it in his mouth, one paci was up, one in the crib - but no paci in the mouth. Progress.

The third night, we dropped it to one paci and that one made it into the crib but not in his mouth.

The fourth night, it was one paci and it never left the top of the crib. It was funny though because in the middle of the typical Mary Poole/Perritt banter on their way to sleep we heard a lot of this on the monitor: "Paci going just right dare." As if he were talking himself off the no-paci ledge. When we went in the next morning he was so proud. "Paci just right dare. I no no need it."

But that paci stayed there all night. The next day we tried it again. Same thing. The paci never moved. The next day, we just took it away altogether and that was that. He didn't even mention it. Keep in mind this is the one thing he's had as part of his sleep routine since his birth. He literally had never slept without it. Not once. Not ever. And then one night, he just didn't.

No crying. No knashing of teeth. Just a little boy bidding his buddy a protracted goodbye. This was a couple of weeks ago now and I don't even know where those pacis are in the house. They're just, gone. Like so many other things I suppose. I guess I just thought there would be more pomp and circumstance about leaving something so integral behind. But like the leaves every fall, even big events can pass quickly and quietly, one leaf at a time.