#6

Happy Birthday my girl!!!

In a blink of an eye my daughter has been transformed from someone who looks like they should be playing an urchin child in a production of Les Miserables.....

to an extra in a sequel to Joe Dirt.

I'm still not sure whether to laugh or cry and I have a hard time looking at it without cringing, just a little....but I've got to say, we have been having a good time stocking up on funky hats.

"I DON'T want to go to my old empty house.......and I DON'T want to go to my new messy house........I'm just going to stay here.......AND SIT ON MY ASS!!!!!!!"

In case you were wondering exactly how the kids were adjusting to the move, the above conversation, which happened to take place in a main isle of our local shopping mall, should sum it up quite nicely for you. I'm not sure what the proper parenting response to that little scene is but it probably would have been lost on me as I was trying too hard not to laugh to make any form of speech possible.

If you give a kid some scissors......she'll give herself a mullet

There are certain things that are fairly concrete on my list of "Stuff I don't want to see on the floor when I walk in the house." (doesn't everyone have that list?) Large tufts of hair are one of them, making the list somewhere after "things that should be found inside the body" and somewhere ahead of "various foodstuffs." I've got to admit that initially my reaction was one of horror and I found myself wondering if our feline companion had suddenly satisfied her craving for cavy. As a ran to the guinea pig cage and heard their excited squeaks as my footsteps fell in the general vicinity of the fridge I was filled with a definite sense of relief. That is until I noticed that there was even more hair in various tufts all over the kitchen floor. Upon closer inspection, I realized that a majority of the hair was in fact human and could only belong to one member of our household. This particular individual could also be referred to as a repeat offender and has sat through more than one lecture on the requisite qualifications of salon personnel. Apparently these discussions fell upon deaf ears.

I felt at this point that it was fairly safe to assume that the darker black and grey chunks probably came from her tabby side kick and cringed thinking about exactly what the cat had to endure over the course of the evening's cut-a-thon. More than a little uneasy at this point I continued to wander the house in search of the guilty party. Then I saw her, standing under the glare of the hallway light with at distinctly guilty looking grin plastered on her face. To be truthful, I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry. My darling little girl with the long, wavy locks had given herself a mullet.....and done such a good job of it that it looked fairly professional. I wouldn't say that I'm a particularly superficial person, and I do have a strong belief in the importance of being able to express yourself, but at this point, I kind of felt sick. I stood there, dumbfounded, words eluding me as I realized that for the next while, every time we take her out in public it will actually look like we wanted her hair to look like this.

Because, everyone wants to have Billy Ray's love child, no?

She sat on my lap, body nestled against mine, dark eyes wide in the waning light of the day. The room around her was in a relative state of chaos with moving boxes stacked in precarious towers against the wall and the remainders of a hastily consumed meal strewn over the counter tops. That's when I noticed it. Something so small that it was barely perceptible. If I had been a different parent in a different time, I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought. As the room grew increasingly dim, her eyes had more and more difficulty trying to focus. The pupils would constrict and then dilate, trying desperately to hang on to a view that was proving elusive.
With a sinking feeling, I was reminded once again, exactly why we were making this move in the first place.