Cutting off My Daughter's Hair

So I finally did it... I took my little girl to have all of her hair cut off, just like she'd been begging me to.

Here's her goofy little "before" picture, just to show how long it had gotten. But oh how she hated that hair! Hated brushing it, hated having it put up or fussed with and just cried when she was outside and the wind would blow it in her face! It's only the last few months that she's been asking to have it gone but it's been bothering her for much longer than that. I think it just took her awhile to figure out the solution. (Having a baby whose short hair is never in his way probably helped.) So we went out and did it, because I realized that the reasons I wasn't had nothing to do with her and were all about ME liking her hair the way it was. And really, it's not even on my head. 

I was worried about how she would look with short hair, but I was surprised to catch a glimpse of someone I thought I'd seen the last of; baby Sophie :)

Same big eyes and little smirk, significantly closer to the ground in this picture though ;)

I'd joked about cutting her hair with a few people during her "I want a Mohawk" phase and I heard a lot of "I could never do that!". Even the hairdresser was pretty horrified. She spent as much time trying to gently talk me out of it as she did cutting her hair! You know what though? All of the reasons (She'll look like a boy with short hair at that age. It will take so long to grow back. When she goes to school all of the other girls will have long hair. It looks so nice that length.) were about other people, me included, and their expectations and comfort zones. When I realized I was putting it off I stopped and though; what if I added up all of the times she was upset about her hair? All of those moments she lost playing or enjoying being outside because the wind was blowing it in her face? All of the mornings where just having it brushed upset her before we'd even left the house? Days and weeks and months and years worth of those moments. All because she's already being told what she's supposed to look like, even at three years old. So today we went to the hairdressers for her first real haircut. She sat beautifully, barely cringing at the sprayed water and the scissors near her face. And on the way home she ran in the wind, laughing, with nothing in her way.