Typically, the general theme of Thanksgiving is gratitude. However, after this week if I were to be asked what the general theme of my last few days was, I would reply hairy.
It all started one evening when my daughter, who's home visiting from college, corn rowed our son's luxurious locks. Our kids are part Native Hawaiian, and thanks to my M'urican breeding, my son is also was blessed with some pretty fantastic curls. Since he is growing his hair out, the resulting look when he took the cornrows out the following morning resembled Frank Zappa in his prime.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
First of all, the house was full of large adolescents all week. It twas kinda a nice throw back to the previous years of it being all teens all the time on my farm. The older set all came home from college and they all seem to like to congregate on our estate. It was pretty nostalgic, although as I made three hundred pancakes and cooked pounds of breakfast meats, I also did express a little graitude for the fact that I don't have to cook like that ALL the time anymore. Yay for growing up!
That said, the hair care extravaganza emerged as this Thanksgiving's theme continued as the daughter cornrowed her other brother's luxurious locks. I say brother because my daughter is the only girl among many, many boys that have been adopted into the fold as brothers. Most of my friends had all boys and for whatever reason, there are just boys everywhere round here.
After turning her brother into something resembling a lightning struck poodle, the next phase of Hair Thanksgiving elapsed, the clippers were produced. Her one brother C, who had about shoulder length locks, proceeded to have her shave his entire head. As my female offspring spent the last decade showing cattle, she's pretty adept at mowing off overgrown fluff. Before you could obnoxiously moo there was a freshly shorn bruh sitting in my kitchen.
Later, the hair-fest continued as she curled my freshly coiffed hair so I would look presentable for a Friendsgiving dinner we were going to attend. I actually liked how it turned out, I had the whole Scarlett Johansson from from the Avengers retro style vibe going.
But then, she began spiral curling the boy's hair.
Sigh.
As we sat around giggling about all the fun we had this week while the kids were home, all adorned with our fresh new coiffeurs, I found myself smiling more than a bit. I have enjoyed my kids throughout all the stages of their lives thus far, and this transition to adulthood is no different. We still get to have the fun of watching the hubs beat on them randomly with items when he wakes up in the morning and finds them sprawled all over their furniture, I love making them things like chocolate chip pancakes, and we all enjoy reliving their escapades of days past. That and listening to them recount the things they get up too like bush-craft camping the days before Thanksgiving and challenging middle-aged men to basketball games.
My life truly is a blessing and I am grateful for it. Especially now that they have all returned to college and I don't have three billion dishes to do every day any more.
But life isn't fun if you don't let your hair down on occasion, is it?
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's never in need of a hair cut or style iPhone.