Bye bye baby

As inevitable as death, taxes and TV show dry spells, the day of Peyton's first haircut was coming and it was getting to be just a question of when. Monte had had enough of strangers commenting on how pretty his sweet little girl is (dang it, he IS pretty), and the other boys needed haircuts, so after the intervention, off we went on Friday to SportsClips. Peyton's hair was a little long, I'll admit, but it's basically cotton candy air fluff, and there really isn't much there when you get right down to it. Besides, he's so pretty and it's not THAT long. However, I am a reasonable person, and when threatened with being excluded from the first haircut and just finding out it happened later, I was motivated to go ahead and get on the haircut bandwagon that everyone else was already aboard. Here are some before and after pictures from the big day.

See, nobody but me gets that now that his hair's been cut, he's a little boy. He was a baby until Friday at 4:30, and after that he became a boy. It's the Christian version of a bar mitzvah--my son is a man, without the reading from the torah and the obligatory band. He no longer needs his mom in the same way as he did before. You think I'm being melodramatic, but later that night, he used a fork successfully, and he now says the words "fla" (flower) "Maah" (more) and "guh" (juice/drink). If he sees the floor he reaches for it, and once there he's off like a shot, in whatever direction I'm not in. I mean, give him a driver's license and a bank account, and suddenly he's calling me "mother" and shaking my hand in greeting. Waaaaaaaaaaaa!