Mothers Against Scissors - M.A.S.

Many people have heard my views on scissors before.  Simply said, I'm pretty much against them as a general rule, especially around children.  I joke about how I keep all scissors locked up in a lock box on a high shelf (along with all permanent markers and fingernail polish), but it's not too far from the truth.  I really do in fact keep them all up high in the kitchen or locked in my bathroom. Now I confess that it's a pain when I need to cut something open.  But it is TOTALLY worth it to avoid my own personal worst nightmare: one of my girls cutting her own hair.  I know it's not that big of a deal to some moms, but somehow it's always been a huge fear of mine that one of the girls will take the scissors right down to the roots at the front of her forehead and cut.  I figure if this ever happens (even with all of my scissor-hiding) then I will have FAILED at my personal goals as a mother and will need to be institutionalized.  It's very possible.

And to illustrate my point of how incredibly strongly I feel about this, when McKinley was in kindergarten and I had my first parent/teacher conference, the only thing her teacher mentioned that McKinley needed to work on was her cutting things out with scissors.  I'm pretty sure I replied (with my jaw hanging open), "You let them use SCISSORS?!!"  I'd rather my children have no fine-motor skills and still have all of their hair than become adept at cutting out shapes and things.  Priorities are important.

Sooooo, how did I like the movie Tangled?  (This applies to my story, I promise). If you haven't seen it yet, it's about Rapunzel and her long blond magical hair that gets cut at the end to save her, and the magic hair turns brown when cut (sorry, spoiler alert...but you see it coming from a mile away, I promise).  I took McKinley and Kennedy to see it last year, and as we left the theater I emphasized to them OVER AND OVER how in real life when long hair gets cut like that - the hair would never look nearly as great as Rapunzel's did all cute, jagged, and short.  I also reminded them how it doesn't look very good when little girls try to cut their own hair, because of course I've had to show Kennedy pictures online of little kids who've tried it, like these ones:  

Kennedy is incredibly vain about her hair, so pictures like these girls' have been the best deterrent I've found - in fact she's seen little girls with really short hair at stores before and she asks me if it looks like that because cut their own hair with scissors. (Rules have to make sense to Kennedy in order for her to decide if she wants to obey them or not.)

So I thought the "critical years" of self-haircuts had passed, and that both McKinley and Kennedy were WAY too old to ever try it.  And we figured if Maddox tries it on his hair, we'll just give him a buzz cut - he's a boy so it's no big deal. 

But then last week I came into the kids' bathroom and I found THIS on the counter:

My first reaction when I saw it was to breath deeply over and over and say, "No, no, no, no. She did not."  I was terrified that there might be a much larger pile of hair somewhere else, hiding.  And I knew exactly whose hair it was because Kennedy is our only child with even slightly blond-ish hair.  Apparently I had left my bathroom door unlocked that morning for a bit (which does happen occassionally, because I'm in and out of there getting things throughout the day), and Kennedy must have snuck my bathroom scissors out to the kids bathroom for a little experiment -- she is such a little sneak!  Of course when I confronted her with the hair and the scissors, she looked at me with squinted, appraising eyes and said, "Where did you get those?"  She was going to try to deny it!  After a few futile attempts at trying to find out how much I already knew, she realized she was cornered and this was our conversation:

Me: "Now tell me the truth. Is this your hair?"

Kennedy (staring levelly, straight into my eyes with no expression on her face): "Yes."

Me: "Why would you do that?  You know the rules.  Why would you want to cut your pretty hair?"

Kennedy, with a nonchalant little shrug: "I just wanted to see if it would turn brown, and it didn't."

  Aaaah!  Can you believe it?  I knew the plot from Tangled would come back to haunt me!  LUCKILY, she only cut off about 1 inch, and it was on a small piece of hair in the front.  It could have been SO much worse.  But still, with Kennedy and her innate curiosity you never know when she's going to try another experiment!    We've told her that if tries cutting it again, we're going to let Daddy chop it all off -- nice and short like Maddox's hair.  That should scare her straight for at least a little while!  Hopefully her vanity will save us. I'm just glad she's such a girly-girl about her hair that she's easily scared.

 And I get asked the question all the time if I'm trying to grow Kennedy's hair out really long,  but I don't really care how long it is as long as it's all the same length.  Her hair has just grown and grown over the last few years because we've been afraid to let Kennedy even SEE scissors cutting hair, so when we've trimmed it (I think twice total in the years since her willful disobedience set in), we actually had Milt turn the hair clippers on making a buzzing noise and we pretended to cut her hair with them behind her back while I quickly and quietly snipped the ends of her hair with scissors.  This way she thinks that hair clippers are what is used on hair and we hoped she wouldn't get any ideas about a fun new thing to try cutting with scissors.  Trust me with this one --  I know my darling Kennedy well, and this ruse was the safest way to get her hair trimmed without putting more ideas into her head.  She's got plenty of schemes in there already, all on her own!