What Finally Made me Chop my 3 Year Old’s Hair

I love Rhett’s hair. He has the cutest bouncy curls that compliment is round little face. His hair is wild and untamed and it fits so much about him. We’ve been asked so many times if we were ever going to cut his hair and I’ve always just said we’ll trim it so it doesn’t get too long but that I love the shaggy surfer-dude look.

I usually keep it about shoulder length and let it do it’s own thing. No products, brushing or gel-ing necessary, other than the summer when I do a man-bun sometime so he can play in the lake without hair in face constantly.

Two weeks ago however, we had an incident that nearly made me shave him bald. I was sitting on the couch running my fingers through his hair and as I pulled my fingers out, I noticed something in his hair. Thinking it was dirt, I reached in and pulled it out- only it was a bug. He’d been outside all morning so I didn’t think much of it until a few minutes later when he itched his head and suddenly it hit me- he had lice.

I never thought my kids would get lice, I mean, they’re boys, right? But Rhett does have long hair so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sawyer’s Kindergarten class has probably sent home 20 emails this year saying a kid in the class had lice and I always just ignored them, but when he got home and I checked his head- lice there too.

The next 24 hours were spent ripping every pillowcase, sheet, cushion cover, towel, hat and blanket from our house and burning it all. I’m kidding, but that’s what I wanted to do. We had so much laundry that I begged my Mom to take some to her house and then half way through all of the laundry here at our house, our washing machine broke. All 3 boys got hair cuts because it was so much easier to use the lice treatment with shorter hair (ps if anyone is wondering what we used, we bought this and it was really easy to use, the kids didn’t complain, and it worked great). Ford got a buzz cut, Sawyer got really short sides with a shorter top, and I had to take inches off of Rhett’s pretty long locks. I know they’ll grow back but this is the shortest his hair has been since he was a baby and it made me so sad to cut it, but the alternative of possibly not being able to get all the lice out was worse, so away the curls went.

I’m still not used to seeing him with short hair and keep mistaking him for Ford. I’m already looking forward to it getting longer again, just as long as we don’t have a return of the unwelcome guest.

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