Hair-story

In honor of Ben turning one, Elizabeth and I thought we'd do a little tribute to Ben's hair.

The first two things the nurses said right after Ben was born were, "He's huge--he must be 10 pounds!" and "Look at that hair!" Only a slight exaggeration on both accounts: he was a few ounces shy of 10 pounds, and while he couldn't really compare to his Swanson cousins, he did have more hair than either of his sisters.

Ben had to be taken to the nursery pretty frequently during our hospital stay for blood tests and antibiotics; after one trip the nurse brought him back looking like this:

Baby's first faux-hawk

Sometimes babies will lose the hair they're born with. . .but not Ben. His long blonde hair just got longer and blonder. We had a lot of fun playing with it, styling into all sorts of silly hairdos:

the "Astroboy"

the "Cheap Toupee"

the "Kewpie doll"

the "Bozo"

the "Hitler"

the "Oompa Loompa"

No matter what we did, though, it always reverted back to a style that we affectionately referred to as "the Trump":


Something in me just couldn't bear to cut my baby boy's hair, but by the time he was 8 months old, I had no choice; it was literally hanging in his eyes. So one evening we put on a Baby Einstein video and I gave him a quick--and I do mean QUICK--trim:


Much better. No more Mr. Trump. . .though there's still plenty of length for Mom to play with:

the "Elvis"