Two paths diverged in the salon

It's St. Patrick's Day, and I'm Irish. Top o' the morning to ya! After we find our pot o' gold, let's have some corned beef and cabbage! We'll have it with green beer, while sitting in a patch of shamrocks.

Here at Ye Olde Fierce Beagle Inn, we even celebrate by turning our innards green and having them surgically extracted. I think that covers it.

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Today was Ethan's third haircut. The first was done by a family friend, Judy, while we were in Los Angeles over the summer. Judy did my first haircut as well as my brother's in her kitchen. Ethan sat on the very same oak table I grew up eating at while she trimmed up his bangs and left his curls. I kept some of the clippings.

His second haircut was what I like to refer to as his first official haircut. We went to my salon, he sat in a chair on a booster seat, and had his wispies trimmed while draped in a zebra-print smock. This was a serious cut, so I kept some of the curls.

On to the third haircut, or the second official haircut, depending on whose calendar you're using. The thought of those precious, fluffy tangles being swept up and thrown away...affected me. That little bird's nest I bury my nose in every morning just didn't belong in the garbage. That's when I knew: This was The Moment.

I believe there's at least one moment in every person's life where you can cross over. You have two options: Do the thing you don't really want to do for the sake of being normal, or Do the weird thing and begin your downward spiral into mental illness.

More specifically, my choices were these: Let go already, or Collect some more clippings and 20 years from now on the morning of your son's college graduation find yourself weeping on the floor amid dozens of bags of his hair collected over the past two decades.

I reluctantly decided not to be the Hair Bag Lady. So. Today I spent $25 on a haircut for a 2 year old, but I saved hundreds of thousands on psychiatric bills. We'll mark that one as a win.