Wednesday, December 28, 2011

A preschooler "rite of passage"

 Lilian begged to get in the shower with me.  She didn't need her hair washed because she'd taken a bath just the night before but I told her she could climb in anyhow.  I had my eyes closed while washing my hair when I heard her shove the shower curtain aside and climb out.  I just figured she was done and didn't think too much of it until a minute or two later when she climbed back in again.
"What's up, Lilian?" I asked.  "Did you have to go to the bathroom?"
"No, " she replied.  "I wanted to check in the mirror to see if I had a hole in my head."
WHAT??
I whipped her around and found that she did indeed have a "hole" in her head....and it was bleeding.  While my eyes had been closed and my back turned, Lilian had quietly grabbed hold of a razor and decided to experiment with it on the back of her head.
The blood wasn't too bad, really.  Just a little scrape, but Lilian was equal parts fascinated and horrified that her head was bleeding.  She had a small bald spot where she'd shaved her hair away but other than that, it didn't look too bad.
Nah, it wasn't until I got the bleeding stopped and tried to brush through the rats nest in her hair...only to have that whole knotted rats nest come out into my hand....that I realized how much hair she had lost.  It's very thin back there...but it is BACK there which means it'll be much easier to hide than if she had shaved the top of her head.  I put her hair in a pony tail today.  It was very thin...but it at least covered the worst of things.
I'm starting to think that cutting their own hair is some rite of passage that all preschoolers must go through.  Of course, usually it's a pair of scissors rather than a razor they take to their heads...

2 comments:

Dayna RN said...

What are you going to do? Just let it grow out, or cut it to match? I think she'd be darling with short hair.

Julie DeMille said...

My friend's 3 year-old took her dad's razor and shaved a 2 inch wide strip right up the center of the top of her head. NO way to cover it up-except with a hat. Surprisingly, my daughter never did this.