Blogs and babysitting

I have discovered something very interesting about blogs: they are fascinating! Now, it may seem a little strange that I am just coming to this conclusion only now, but until I was emailed Dawn Mehaan's Pokemon card ad from eBay, and followed the link to her blog, I had never actually read one. Dawn is honestly the funniest person I have ever not met. Her blog is at mom2my6pack.blogspot.com. I laugh myself silly every time I read something she wrote, even if I'm reading it for the umpteenth time. Then I found out that some of my friends had blogs, too. And they recommend blog sites from other people. Imagine that! It seems to me that the writers of 6 Degrees would have had more seasons if they had just done the rounds through the blogging world(of which I have realized I am woefully ignorant). Just think, we are all just blogs away from the person we would most like to meet. . .it could be fun!

All of which just goes to show how little I seem to understand the technology we all take for granted. Although, unlike my nine year old, I do know enough not to experiment with cooking in the microwave with metal containers. . .what? Oh, yes, that was one of the stories that got me started blogging. See, I called my great homeschooling friend Heidi and began to regale her with the lengthy list of my woes this last Friday. The "Leave scissors where the 5 year old can find them and cut his own hair" story, the "Buy the nine year old her own pudding mix to cook in the microwave because she'll have so much fun" story, and the "We must experiment with physics and the newly opened bag of chips" story caught her fancy, and she really wanted me to start a blog. Why she would want to read them quickly and impersonally on the Internet when I am perfectly happy to spend hours upon hours, day after day, repeating the same stories to her over and over, I really don't know. No accounting for taste. But I can read what Dawn writes quite quickly, and I read much faster than I can listen (probably because my ears have to process so many things at once and I can really only look at one thing at a time---my ears just have a slower clock speed), so my suspicious mind is beginning to think that Heidi suspects I might be spending too much time on the phone. Perish the thought! Anyway, Heidi told me how to start this blog, and even posted the first (and so far, only!) comment I have received. Which is kind of cool; she wasn't trying to distract me with the computer and get me off the phone, after all, she really is reading this. Hi, Heidi!

Well, the "Leave the scissors where the five year old can find them" story is really not so original. Everyone I have bitterly bewailed my fate to has a similar story about one of their children, even my dad. No need to ask which kid of his made a disastrous personal foray into the unforgiving world of "I will cut my own bangs, since Mom has no time, because it will look just as good as if Mom did it and, besides, it'll be fun!" The night before kindergarten pictures.

My oldest son has been watching his little brother from time to time as my husband and I take very short jaunts to nearby places to run errands. Never more than a few minutes away because, as I have indicated, I have a suspicious mind, to date there have been no major disasters as he takes his temporary position of power and supervision quite seriously. His almost ten year old little sister is quite good with little brother, as well, and they make an excellent team when keeping an eye on him. Most of the time.

This particular errand was to the local bookstore to pick up a copy of Farmer Boy for a home school book study unit. Somehow the last copy was not on the shelf with the 2,000 other home school titles, including every other title penned by Laura Ingalls Wilder and a few by her daughter. But the one we really needed was Farmer Boy, and as my husband has this dreadful Book Habit, he decided to keep me company as I went to the local used book store. After rooting around in all the wrong places, I had just located the copy of Farmer Boy that would actually match and fit into the book jacket with the unlost Little House on the Prairie books, when, right on cue, my phone rang.

"Mom? We have a big problem here. . ." My first instinct was to fling my newly found prize to the floor and flee wildly into the parking lot in an attempt to beat the firemen to my house so they wouldn't trip on the laundry my kids flung down the stairs when attempting to clean their rooms. Or any of the other man traps of shoes, junk, or unidentifiable objects they lay, lose, or toss willy-nilly throughout the house on any given day. Then I remembered the advice of dear friend, whose darling granddaughter will tell her in times of stress, "Breathe, Grandma, breathe!"

I took a deep breath, and in a voice that sounded almost calm, I said, "Oh? What happened?" Visions of flooded toilets, exploding eggs in microwaves, couches on the roof, filled my active imagination. "James cut his hair." At first I didn't quite know what to say. It seemed pretty minor compared to what I was imagining. "What do you mean?" "Well, Mom, I was reading Carry on Mr. Bowditch, and K.T. was in the bathroom, and James was really quiet. Then I saw that he was cutting his hair." I breathed out loudly, thinking we had dodged the bullet. A little bit of missing hair. . . not so bad, really. Nothing had prepared me for what I found when I got home a short while later.

My beautiful five year old, with hair so fine and silky it doesn't even tangle, had four inch long hair in a kind of Greek-looking page boy all the way around his head. He had managed to cut the hair from the front of his face to the back of his head, with a pair of blunt pointed children's school scissors sister left out when she ran to the bathroom. A voice sounded in my head, "Breathe, Grandma, breathe!" Who knew those useless little scissors could cut baby fine silk when they won't even dent construction paper. What I really think is, my youngest child is so talented, he could shear sheep with a butter knife.

After hiding all the butter knives, I sat James down with a sucker, stuck a 3/4 inch guard on my hair razor, and started shaving his head. No dice, his hair was almost down to the root in several places. Good thing those safety scissors can't cut skin. I tried the 1/2 inch blade with better success. My beautiful boy with the cherubic face and beautiful hair quickly became my beautiful boy with the cherubic face and sort of no hair. While I shaved his head, our conversation went something like this.

"James, don't you remember the rule about scissors?"

"Scissors are for paper, not hair. Mommies, and sometimes Daddies, cut hair. Kids cut paper. The paper Mommies and Daddies give them."

He obviously remembered the rules. What happened?

"What happened James? Why didn't you follow the rules?"

"I forgot. And I couldn't see, so I cut my hair."

That's a pretty good explanation for a five year old, I think. He'll get his next pair of scissors as a High School graduation gift.

And my oldest will be taking CPR, First Aid, babysitting, and underwater rescue classes next month. Just in case.