Great Clips

I have to start with a warning...this blog may be a little emotional for some of you. Get some tissue and hunker down. This is real life at its most brutal.

I walked in from my meeting yesterday to find a couple members of my family looking a little sheepish. "What's going on?" I asked innocently enough. "H. got a little haircut" my husband answered...and I kid you not, my heart stopped beating.

Turns out my little M. was giving everyone a little "beauty" treatment in the bathroom. First he had brushed my husband's hair and escorted him into the living room and put him down for a nap. A few minutes later J. came screeching into the room shouting, "M. just got a pair of scissors and went back into the bathroom and locked the door." By the time my husband got the door opened, the damage was done. M. had been brushing her hair with one of my round brushes and H.'s hair had become hopelessly tangled. So he immediately solved the problem as any 4-year old would and went to get a pair of scissors to cut the brush out. I sat on the chair and listened to the story in sheer horror. J. came in carrying a bag FILLED with curly blond hair. H. came in a moment later to show me her "haircut" in the back and I got up off the chair, walked into my bedroom, shut the door, and cried.

OK, it is just hair. It will grow back. She really needed a haircut anyway. But the truth of the matter is that I wasn't quite ready to have my hand forced in the matter. He cut a good little chunk out of the back of her hair right against the scalp so there really is no haircut that is going to disguise the situation. It was heartbreaking to me. I've seen this day coming ever since I put those curls up in their first little whale spout on top of her head but I wasn't ready for it. I guess to me it represented a little piece of her childhood gone that I won't ever get back. Her curls are growing out and she is changing physically every single day, right before our eyes. Seeing that chunk gone reminded me that there are moments of who she is right now that are passing and gone forever. I really am not trying to be overdramatic about a silly thing but it was a really hard moment for me.

Today H. and I went to my friend's house for her first haircut. H. was SO excited! She loved the chair that could grow tall, the special fish cape, and the mirror she could smile at herself in. She explained to my friend that she wanted "Snow White" hair (short hair), not Sleeping Beauty hair (long) and when she was all done being primped, she got out of the chair, gave me a big smile and said, "Now I have short hair like you!"

Her hair is not that short. It is shoulder length and looks really cute on her. I didn't shed a tear today and felt happy at the joy she gleaned during her "first haircut" experience. But tonight I took down the bag filled with golden curls and looked at them for a few moments. And then I went in and gave my great big grown up princess a kiss good night!

Prego Sauce Disaster of 2007

I don't believe in fighting over food...especially jars of spaghetti sauce. I'm definitely a pacificist when it comes to verbally assaulting someone over a $.69 jar of sauce that quite frankly, I don't think tastes all that great. But there I was...at our local Smith's grocery store at 5:55 a.m. watching women act like rabid dogs fighting over a pallet of sauce. It started innocently enough....

At presidency meeting last week, my good friend turns to me and says, "Hey, did you hear about the deal Smith's is having on spaghetti sauce?" I replied with, "You mean that grocery store that smells like poop and has weevils in all its food?" She didn't miss a beat. "Yeah, that one. They're having this deal where you can get Prego spaghetti sauce for $.69 a jar. [This was the part where she listed all the women from the neighborhood that she had seen there.] Wanna go?" I knew immediately that I needed to be suspicious. "What does this entail?" Turns out you had to be standing at the doors at 6:00 a.m. to get a shot at the one measley pallet they put out. I seriously don't know what possessed me but I agreed to get up and go with her the next morning.

So at 5:45 a.m. my friend pulls up in her van. I jump in and tell her that I will never, ever do this ever again and she better appreciate the early morning company because I don't even like my children well enough to get up at this hour. We drive to the poop-infested grocery store and there are a bunch of cars in the parking lot. Several women have approached the first set of electric, sliding doors and someone says, "Hey these doors are locked! AND THERE ARE WOMEN IN THERE SHOPPING!" Some light door pounding ensues until a heavy-set woman at the other set of doors says, "Over here. I think I can slide them open." And she proceeds to insert her chubby fingers into the doors and pry them open. We all go rushing in and I feel a little bit like a salmon caught in an uphill swim. By the time we reach the forklift, the spaghetti sauce is gone and the whining starts. "Who let those women in? Why don't they limit the number of cases you can get? The store isn't supposed to open until 6:00 a.m." whine, whine, whine, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, the guilty culprits are standing in a big long line at the checkout stand with baseball caps pulled over their greedy little faces trying to bury their noses in check stand magazines. ONE lone checkout lady is trying to handle the 6:00 a.m stampede and no one is going anywhere. My friend immediately pulls out her hefty wad of coupons and starts shopping the Campbell's soup deal. I wander around a little, check out the Hamburger Helper, look at the darling new Kleenex boxes, and finally push my empty cart over to the eternal checkout line to save a place for my friend and get caught up on the latest celebrity news in People magazine. I just couldn't bring myself to buy anything. I wasn't going to be "one of them". I was going to stand tall and proud as the "lone wolf" of shopping deals. I read an entire magazine by the time we got up to pay and by then they had 2 clueless checkout clerks who spent more time arguing over how to scan all the stuff then they actually spent scanning.

I got home around 7:00 a.m. and I felt dirty. Not only had I entered an establishment that I swore I would never enter, but I had been a part of some serious nastiness of those jars of spaghetti sauce. The funny thing is...since last week, I've had at least 3 conversations with different people who have brought up the Prego sauce fiasco and all the trauma they went through trying to get their rightful case of sauce. I told my husband they might need to call in the trauma unit. It is going to take a while for this little town to heal.

As for me, I'm going to continue buying my food at regular price, sleeping in until 7:00 a.m. and eating my spaghetti without the stinking sauce.


P.S. Just a weird side note...when I did a google search for "spaghetti sauce", the following image showed up:

Anyone? Anyone?