Yesterday was a day of much festive cleaning around here.  Kathryn came over to my house with her brood for day one of the cleaning swap.  Today, I will take my clan and go help her house sparkle like mine does.

But hopefully we will not have another incident.

We were having such a good time, DYM and me.  We were getting so much done!  My house was so clean!  The laughs!  The good times!  I guess we were a little too distracted.

Spider came down the stairs with hair all over her back.  I brushed it off and said, "Oh, you’ve been playing with Rosie, have you?"  I thought nothing more of it, and with our cleaning wrapped up, Kathryn went to retrieve her children.

Back of baby's head"It’s not Rosie, Stephanie!" came the cry from the playroom.  "Sugar is a bald man!" she declared as I walked upon the scene. And there they all were, Laylee in the barber chair, Magoo looking like a refugee, and Sugar ready for Nascar with her mulletousness.  (All choice phrases from the Daring Young Mom herself.)

And then I peed my pants. Well, almost.  The situation itself combined with the way Kathryn described it, was too much.  I excused myself and when I returned I was still laughing too hard to express my seriousness to the offenders. 

The culprits

This picture doesn’t even do justice to what the hair looked like.  But don’t they all look so guilty?  As I uploaded the pictures this morning, I askMulleteded Sugar about what happened.  

Me: Who cut your hair?
S: Laylee.
Me: Who cut Magoo’s hair?
S: Laylee.
Me: Who cut Spider’s hair?
S: Laylee
Me: (Aren’t you guilty of anything?)Whose hair did you cut?
S: Laylee’s.

As Kathryn was leaving I told her I was sorry and hoped she wasn’t mad.  She said, "at least none of my kids has a mullet."  And it was true.  We have always struggled with Sugar’s hair being mullet like, and our little Barbershop Quartet did nothing to keep her out of the trailer park.  They cut only the top and left the back as long as ever.

Mulleted.

And I was left no choice.  I made an appointment for her and Charming and then I left for a meeting.  I wasn’t even there for the cut.  Not there as my baby’s ringlets fell to the floor.  Not there as they chopped off her girlish locks.  My first glimpses of the new style were as Sugar lay in bed asleep.  I stroked her little head and cried on the inside.  Her beautiful, crazy curls, gone.  No more pigtails.  No more twisting fingers in the baby-fine softness.  No more brushing and combing exchanges with Mommy and Daughter. Just this:

At least she's smiling 

But at least she’s smiling.