Learning The Hard Way...

I came home from a meeting one night to sleeping kids and Juan's warning, "Just to let you know... Tori experimented with scissors tonight, and she kind of gave herself a haircut...". 
"Oh no... how bad is it?" I winced. "Pretty bad. But she was so excited to show me, I think she actually was proud of it at first. But my reaction wasn't good, so she quickly felt bad about it and now she's upset". 
Aw, I felt sorry for my little girl. She calls herself a "designer" and she loves to try new things with clothes and hair and drawings etc. Like me, she's not afraid to do different things with her hair, but I bet she thought it would grow back if she wanted it to...   

Before we 'fixed it up'. She had began to
realize the result did not match her expectation.

I remember when I was in 4th grade I used my sister's shaver and shaved both my arms in the shower one night. I was so excited to show my mum, but you can imagine her response, "You're going to regret that when it begins growing back". And she was right. I remember wearing my sweater to school for weeks during a very hot summer, until all the hairs had grown back. They were prickly and thick and I was just mortified. So I totally understood what my baby girl was going through. 

The next morning I called her into my room and braced myself for a shock. She hesitantly approached me with her head down. "Hey, that looks great!" I said. She looked up. "Huh?" "Yeah, I think it looks very pretty. It totally suits you". She smiled. I was lying of course, it looked ridiculous, but I honestly did feel that her face was pretty enough to pull it off, so it was not a total loss. But yes, it was a disaster, and she had cut off a LOT more than I had imagined. So I casually offered to 'straighten it up', and we got to work on fixing it. I tried my best, and the result was kinda cute in a Dumb and Dumber kind of way.. Having said that, for the first week I made a note to ask everyone we met, "So, what do you think of Vettoria's new haircut that she did all by herself?", so that they knew the style was in no way my idea... :-)