My husband is not only a great husband, but he’s also an awesome hands-on dad. It’s important for me to get away every now and then with friends, or even on a solo trip, so I can stay connected to EMILY outside of my role as Mommy. Zach is always, always on board for these trips. He encourages me to go! Have fun! He never looks at the time I’m away as time where he’s “babysitting” our kids. He’s their dad! He ENJOYS the quality time with them!
As any parent can probably tell you – the vibe is different when you’re all together as an entire family than it is when it’s just one parent holding down the fort. And those “Daddy times” are times the kids (and Zach) all enjoy and look forward to (which def helps minimize any mom-guilt I may feel about leaving them!).
Back in April I was able to plan a last minute beach weekend with a couple of my good friends and the kids were super pumped for an Epic Daddy Weekend…they just didn’t realize how epic it’d actually end up being 😉
Spear turned three in December and attends a half day preschool three mornings a week. My friends and I decided to head out on a Friday morning which meant Zach had solo time with JUST Spear while the three older kids were in school all day. He took Spear out to the golf course with him and had a great time! Spear ADORES my FIL and Zach loved having his little buddy with him!
This also provides a very perfect “before” photo of what Spear’s hair looked like during that weekend. He was WELL overdue for a haircut but with us having family pictures a week away so we were waiting to give him a fresh cut closer to the time of the family photo session.
I had a really great weekend with my friends and on Saturday evening I Facetimed to say hey to the kids. It was a bit weird that they didn’t answer but I know how crazy it can be around bedtime so I didn’t think too much of it. Then they Facetimed me after Spear was in bed and were outside when calling me which was a bit weird to me and I also thought they were acting kinda strange.They were like HEY MOM and acting very coy.
My oldest, Kye, tells me EVERYTHING and he was acting the most strange and I just thought maybe something had happened that he wanted to wait to tell me in private about or something. Even my friend who was with me on the trip commented that he won’t ever be able to get away with anything because it was super obvious he was hiding something!
Spear is my most wild child and had been in a particularly difficult to parent stage so I was thankful for a bit of a Mommy-break and, like all moms who get such a break, was slightly looking forward to Zach getting to see a bit of how difficult it can be parenting a wild man toddler.
I was also hoping Zach could kinda have a “Daddy boot camp” as Spear tends to respect Zach more and behave better for him so I was hoping that the consistent Daddy time for a few days would help fix some of the parenting struggles I was having with him, particularly with him getting out of his big boy bed during naps and bedtime.
So naturally one of my first questions was to ask how Spear was doing and if he’d been getting into any trouble. They told me “well he only got out of the bed one timeeeee” but again didn’t give anything away. The girls were also being WAY sweeter than usual and kept saying “Mommy how are YOU DOING? What are YOU up to?” – basically keeping the focus on ME and not THEM.
Zach never ended up calling me to say goodnight that night which also isn’t super out of the norm. When we travel away from each other we often don’t end up talking at bedtime because one of us will go to bed earlier than the other and don’t want to bother the one who is away on vacation.
The next morning I was rushing around getting things packed up for check out when Zach text me at 9 am (check out was at 10) to see if a girl in our neighborhood was going to be riding with them to church that morning. I responded but then put my phone down and was busy trying to get out the door and didn’t really check it for a bit.
Once I did look at it I had two missed calls from Zach and a text that said “I have something really important to talk to you about, please call me.”
When I called he had me on speaker phone in the car with all the kids (genius on his part) and said they were on their way to church and that he knew I was going to be very, very, very upset with what he had to tell me but that since he was heading to church he needed to talk to me about it before he got there.
Honestly my first thought DID go to Spear but I was wondering “Oh gosh what did Spear do? What did he break?”
Here’s the back story…apparently Spear had gotten into trouble for not obeying earlier Saturday morning so Zach had Spear sit with him in our bathroom while Zach trimmed his beard with the beard trimmer. Spear sat there alright. And soaked in evvvverything Zach was doing.
So later that day while Zach was cleaning up the kitchen from a meal Spear was watching a movie with the girls. Spear saw his opportunity. He made a run for it when the girls were distracted and went STRAIGHT for our bathroom and STRAIGHT to Zach’s beard trimmer.
Zach told me “I was in the kitchen cleaning up and the girls were watching a movie with Spear and he got into my beard trimmer”
Naturally the first thought I think any parent would have when you learn that your toddler cut their own hair is that they cut it in the front. Some short bangs. A wonky hair style. Even knowing it was a beard trimmer I still pictured him taking the trimmer and buzzing a chunk out of the front of his hair.
I couldn’t mentally process any other mental picture than Spear cutting the front of his hair. I just didn’t visualize anything other than that.
To be fair, Zach kept saying “It’s super, super bad. It’s SO BAD.” But still. I just had that mental picture of my toddler with a bad haircut and trimmed bangs.
He also said “He Looks like Friar Tuck” which, to be fair, is a VERY accurate description of what Spear looked like. But I had no clue who Friar Tuck was. So it did NOT help prepare me.
I was in shock and just sat silently on the other side of the phone. He asked if I was still there and the first thing I said was ” You can NEVER say anything about me not keeping a good enough eye on Spear AGAIN!” Free pass for LIFE right?! 😉
He then asked if I wanted to talk to the kids and to be honest NO I DID NOT. I had yet to SEE the hair and hearing from EACH OF MY KIDS how HORRIBLE it looked didn’t help me one bit. I really didn’t need to hear the entire story retold three different times.
I thanked the girls for the fact that at least it wasn’t one of them. If one of my kids was going to give themselves a hair cut…I’m thankful it was a son and not a daughter! I probably would have cried!
Again, I still hadn’t seen the hair yet. Zach starts telling me how he tried to fix it the best he could and I interrupted and told him DO NOT TOUCH IT. DO NOT FIX IT. I want to take him to a PROFESSIONAL. The last thing we need is for it to be made worse by an attempt to “fix it” at home!
However, Zach was wiser than I was thinking and he had not tried to cut it himself any further or fix the actual haircut…he was just saying he did his best to style it for church that morning. Whew!
It was also very funny that Zach had to take ALL the kids to CHURCH solo that morning. Like if this had to happen I LOVE that it happened when I wasn’t even THERE. Although I do wish I could have been a fly on the wall to see everyone’s reactions at church. We JUST joined a new congregation so it makes the whole thing even funnier that so many of the people at church don’t know us all that well yet and that Zach walked in the building that morning with all the kids and Spear’s jacked up hair hahah!
Once I finally got off the phone Zach sent me texts of the pictures of the hair. They came through in order but I saw them from the bottom scrolling up so I ended up seeing the picture of him with his hair fixed for church that morning FIRST.
So I was like “OH THAT ISN’T THAT BAD!!!”
Anddddd then I scrolled up and saw these:
What child takes a beard trimmer and goes from the BACK to the FRONT like that?!?!? WHHHHHHYYYYYY child whhhyyyyyyy.
Everyone I’ve shown these photos to have agreed – it’s THE worst toddler self hair cut EVER. Right?!?! Like most kids cut their own hair. You picture a child taking some scissors and going to down cutting pieces off. You don’t think of a child getting ahold of a trimmer and straight up SHAVING their heads BALD.
Clearly he took the job seriously too. Like you’d think that little vibration feeling and sound would scare him and he’d stop. But nope. He kept on GOING and GOING until Britt, our oldest daughter, finally walked in and caught him!
Did I mention we had family pictures IN LESS THAN A WEEK!?!?!?!
I literally gasped out loud and had to put my phone down. I was in SHOCK. It was SO MUCH WORSE THAN I WAS EXPECTING. So. Much. Worse.
I assumed we’d have to buzz the whole thing. I mean what else do you do when your toddler cuts his own hair all the way to the scalp?!?!
But Zach was pretty confident in just leaving it and using the long parts to create a comb-over look and invest in some cute hats until it grew in.
When I got home I was really eager to see it and, sure enough, I agreed with Zach on leaving it! It actually looked less horrible in person than I was expecting it to look. When it was combed over it covered the spot pretty well.
It made it even funnier that Spear was SO PROUD of it. He kept saying “it looks awesome.” At least he has that confidence right? 😉
I rushed ordered a hat for pictures that did arrive in time and it looked decent with the long bangs / shaggy hair sticking out from the hat.
I got in touch with my hairdresser and she agreed that we just needed to hold off a bit. If we cut it all it’d have to be literally to his scalp and he would have had had a skinhead. So we left it! She said it would take 6ish weeks to grow in long enough to cut it all even.
Of course I had to do a little photo session to make sure we had this epic toddler self haircut documented for his future wedding video slideshow 😉
BLESS.
It’s a good thing he’s so cute 😉 To my credit, I really didn’t freak out that bad and didn’t even get mad about it. It is what it is. I was able to laugh about it pretty quickly. It’s hair. It grows back. It’s a GREAT story.
We didn’t tell ANYONE about it other than those who saw him at church and my friends who were with me on the trip because we happened to have dinner plans with Zach’s family the night after I got back in town and we wanted to be able to catch their reactions at the surprise.
I took videos of the reactions and included them in this post! CLASSIC.
We also had a bit of fun with his hair and had a campaign for Instagram with a sunscreen company that was well-timed 😉
You can see how the combover really did help!!!
We did a comb-over look as well as a cute hat for the pictures (the pink shirt is during our family photo session) but most of the time at home I didn’t really stress about trying to hide the bald patch and just rolled with it.
It was def a bit of luck that we hadn’t gotten his hair cut in so long prior to the big shaving incident! The longer shaggy hair helped to hide the baldness during the time period of it growing back in.
It got to the point pretty quickly where the new hair growth was “fuzzy” and it started to be more and more difficult to make the combover work because the new hair pushed the longer hair and prevented it from laying across.
Basically it started turning into quite the hot mess and I was SO over the hair in his eyes, hair that couldn’t be fixed, crazy hair every day look that I was EAGER to cut it all off!!!
We waited a little over a month to get his hair cut and when we did get it cut I took him to my own personal hair stylist who I trust fully! I didn’t want her to just buzz it all off to one length as the new growth is still VERY short.
Instead she knew how to make sure to give him a hair style that looks GREAT now but will also look even better as the new hair gets longer!
He went from a shaggy hair toddler to a BIG BOY all in one haircut! I LOVE his fresh look and he loves it too! You can still tell where the new hair is growing in if you know what you are looking for but it’s a HUGE improvement to the crazy hair he’s been rocking for a while now and I’m pretty sure we’ll be keeping a shorter look for him for a while to come because we LOVE it!!!
We def laugh about this story and it’ll be one that gets told for the rest of Spear’s life. I’m so glad we took lots of pictures when he buzzed it as it makes for great conversation starters and he knows better than to ever do it again!
Be sure to watch the video in this post to see all the reactions to his look!
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Curious about your new congregation! Will you be posting on how it was to make the switch from a congregation you know to one you don’t, and why you switched?
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Thank you! We are LOVING it!!! I am not quite sure regarding posting specifics in that decision as we do love everyone at our former congregation and do not want to cause any sort of drama or hurt or anything of the sort ya know? It’d be a delicate thing to share and tricky to navigate! We for sure felt lead by the Lord on the decision and feel like He lead us to where our fam was meant to be 🙂