The first haircut

Every once in a while, at a cafe or playing in the park, somebody would ask me how old Small Boy is. They'd look at him, and say, Wie alt ist sie? Which, for you non-German speakers, translates to how old is she. This always struck me as completely odd, because I think Small Boy pretty clearly looks like a boy. Plus, when in doubt, German gives you a socially and gramatically acceptable way to ask about a child of undetermined gender. Child, in German, takes the neutral. Das Kind. So it's perfectly acceptable to ask Wie alt ist es? How old is it? Seems like the safe course to take if you can't figure out if a kid is a boy or a girl. And really, Small Boy's pretty boy like.

Until you look at the hair.

I guess we let it go a little long, huh?

So on Saturday, in addition to getting a new forward-facing car seat because he'd outgrown his infant car seat, Small Boy got his first haircut. (Yes, we did the car seat and the haircut back-to-back. Yes, it was like beating myself over the head with a hammer emblazened with the words MY BABY IS GROWING UP. Yes, I cried.)

This is the result.


After the initial tears (mine; not, to my great surprise, Boy's), I have to admit, I love the haircut.

Small Boy looks a lot like my brother in this picture. It's interesting, my brother married a German woman - US citizen but pure German blood lines on both sides of her family - and both of his children look very much like our side of the family. I married a true Swiss - in 400 years I'm literally the first non-Swiss on the family tree - and Small Boy looks very much like my side of the family. I think it's like in horse-breeding: our US-mutt genes - a bit Irish, a bit Swedish, a bit English, a bit Czech - came in and kicked the pants off those pure European blood lines. They'd gone a bit soft, you know? But it's strange to think that here I am, this stereotypical US Mischling no more than 25% of any one thing, and my son is 50% Swiss. As strange as it must be for my mother-in-law, who lives 20 minutes from the village of her birth, to think that her grandson has two passports.