Making the Cut

So all that frustrating concerning scissors? That worry that she’d never get it, she’d never learn (or want to learn) to cut a straight line?

I shouldn’t have let it bother me. Heck, we should have let her continue to think she had nothing to learn from scissors.

Scissors are evil. Olivia’s hair can attest to this in no uncertain terms.

In the past month, she’s cut her own hair twice. TWICE!

I realize this is a perfectly normal developmental stage and yay! And all that crap. But come on! Yes, yes, Alyssa did this when she was three. She hid behind a rocking chair and hacked three inches of hair from both sides of her head. Thankfully, her hair was almost to the middle of her back, so all I had to do was even up the back and she had a cute little shoulder-length bob going on.

Olivia’s hair? Is not long enough for her to be chopping away at bits and pieces of it.

The first time she cut it, she only managed to snip off a few pieces here and there and it was barely noticeable.

Yesterday, I arrived at my mom’s house and she asked right off, “Does Olivia’s hair look different?”

Why yes, it did? Why did it look different?

Because she’d used a pair of scissors to cut a chunk of hair, about two inches long right off. That chunk? Used to be the middle of her bangs. Now she has a perpetual center part and it’s just really not a good look. Yes, she’s adorable and can pull almost any look off, but this? Doesn’t work for me. So we’re having to use clips for a few weeks to pull the hair on either side of the area that is now less than half an inch long in hopes of covering it.

Egads! I’ve told her over and over that she’s not supposed to cut her hair. She nods wisely and says, “Okay.” Then she runs off and contemplates the next time she can sneak away with the scissors.

Tom was quick to point out that both of these haircuts happened at my mom’s but to be fair, the first one happened while I was there, so Olivia was technically in my care even if she was at my mom’s house at the time.

But the problem is that we don’t want to stop her from cutting paper. This is an excellent OT project for her. Anyone need any confetti? We’ve got it by the buckets full. But these days, she can’t be handed a pair of scissors and a few pieces of paper and be trusted to only cut the paper. So she needs constant supervision whenever scissors are within reach.

She’ll outgrow this, right? And her hair will survive, right? Damn, we (I?) have a lot of issues with this girl’s hair.