Shorn 'Nuff

Today's the day Nick turns 18 months old. It seems like only yesterday that Aimee was sprawled out by labor pains in the backseat of her mom's Subaru. Traffic crawled that Friday afternoon and Nick almost made his debut on the West Side Highway.

Oh, we can look back at that and laugh, can't we?

(Can't we? Hey! Whoa! Sweetie, please stop throwing books at me.)

Anyway, since that July 30, 2004 day, other than to wash or to brush, we never touched a hair on Nick's head. As you can see by the picture, it was high time we tamed it. In 18 months, Nick's hair reached hockey mullet terrority. And as you know, we couldn't have that. We're a basketball family.

So Saturday we took Nick for his first haircut.

"Nick hasn't had his hair cut?" asked Eric, our blogfather. Nope. "Really?" The Bean still had his original mane.

After lunch and a nap, we headed toward Buzz Cuts in Hoboken (New Yer-saaaay!), because of its kiddie station with a VCR. The video hopefully would act as a visual tranquilizer for the soon-to-be-snipped little nipper.

And it worked. She clipped the first few locks of Nick's wet curls, handed them to us and we taped them to the first-haircut certificate.

And now, the race was on ... to finish.

Nick stayed glued to Elmo dancing across the TV screen for, oh, about two minutes.

Nick wanted to turn his head toward the snipping sounds. You could tell by the look on his face: "What is she doing?"

Mommy, as you can see, eventually had to help hold his head in place.

The woman cutting Nick's hair suggested a balloon. (Boooooooooooon!) That worked for a while too, until the booon kept bouncing into the scissors' path.

Surprisingly, the whole thing didn't last that long and it yielded less hair than I thought it would. When he was done, the mullet had fallen in little tufts on to the floor and our Nick had a new, more aerodynamic 'do.

Same cuteness, not so much hairy-ness.

Then, we paid, we tipped and we left.

We also forgot. We left the certificate with his shorn locks at the salon. Serious bummin'! We called and luckily for us, they still have it. We're going to pick it up on Tuesday.

Still, it was a good weekend. We had bagels at Panera. We (foolishly) headed into Soho/Tribeca/Chinatown on a Saturday to go to the Apple Store to find out why our iPod won't sync to the computer. When traffic proved to be too overwhelming, we just ran our other city errand.

Being the intrepid travelers that we are, we headed into the city again, this time early Sunday morning to drop mommy off at work. They say New York is the city that never sleeps. Sunday mornings are an exception. The city definitely has trouble kicking off the covers after its wild Saturday nights. Traffic, thankfully, is at a minimum.

Nick spoke his first full sentence on our morning sojourn: "I want milk."

"Did you hear that?" Aimee asked.

I had to admit, I missed it as I tried to pay attention to what little traffic there was. That's a definite milestone. Nick's been chatting more and becoming more clear. Where he once said "eh-ah" for "exit" today he said, well, "exit" when he saw the sign in the hallway. Definitely cool.

We also made it to the Apple Store and found parking in SoHo to boot. (Told you NYC's drowsy on a Sunday morning.) The kind gentleman told us how to fix our iPod (it has to do with too many versions on our PC) and I'm trying to (sloooooooowly...) rebuild the iTunes as I type.

Anyhoo, one last update. The weekend before this one, we met up with Steven, Jen and Tess and "Aunt" Deb at Bubby's in Tribeca. Deb was in town to interview for NYU Stern's Business School and Steven, Jen and Tess made the trip over from Brooklyn.

It was good to see everyone (alas, we forgot our camera), but it was too short. Deb had to jet (Amtrak, actually) back to Baltimore that night.

Still, Nick has a fond remembrance of that weekend. Deb got him a stuffed monkey from FAO Schwarz. It's cute. Now, wherever our little monkey goes, his monkey is sure to follow. He also scored a Bubby's balloon.

So, let's recap the last two weekends: Balloon, monkey, balloon, haircut and possible a fully functioning iPod.

Not bad for a span of nine days. Ah, to be a kid again.