Monday, December 19, 2005

I can only hope the first cuts are the last ones

It was nice this morning not to be part of the weekday struggle for the washroom. Strangely enough, even though I was out of the game, the bottleneck and the hostility levels were actually running higher than normal. Now I am use to the Last Amazon taking longer than the rest of us. Today’s bottleneck was via the oldest son who has traditionally taken no notice of his appearance. I cannot count the times I have put a pair of his youngest brother’s jeans into his drawer by accident and he has come out wearing them a la Steve Erkel style and refused to change. This morning, I learned nothing stays the same forever.

Montana decided that he would shave the hair on his upper lip without my supervision as I suppose he felt that I, being a woman, didn’t have any expertise of value to share with him concerning shaving or it might have been that he didn’t want a repeat of the jock strap incident. Once I peeled the multiple pieces of bloody Kleenex away from his upper lip I discovered that he didn’t achieve any measurable success on his own and he’s damn lucky that he doesn’t need stitches to close the wounds.

I can appreciate that he didn’t like walking around with a mustache and he wanted his clean shaven look back. No doubt at 13 it is not easy not looking so different from one’s peers. I blame myself. I had been ignoring his mustache in the hopes that it would just magically go away on its’ own rather than asking him if he was okay with it. I suppose that way I could put off facing the fact that Babbie Boy was growing up and growing up means leaving home sooner than I would wish.

Montana will get an electric razor for Christmas so there will be no more worries of him bleeding to death on the bathroom floor, but am I correct in assuming one uses a dry face with an electric razor?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eldest (also 13) doesn't have to shave yet. Thank god. If you want to be nice to your son .. give him a wet/dry electric razor. He can shave is the shower or use shaving cream with the electric razor .. the burn you get from a dry electric shave hurts like hell.

Babbling Brooks said...

I use an electric every weekday other than when I shave my weekend growth on Mondays. Shaving dry with an electric can chafe some, but it's not the end of the world. I can speak with more credibility than most, since I shave more than most - the only hair on my head are eyebrows and lashes.

Still, if you want to go with the Cadillac for Montana, go for a wet/dry model.

Anonymous said...

Depends on his skin too.

Dry skin + electric == ingrown hairs. I have this problem, as does the father type.

If that's his case then there's only two options. Learn to dig into your neck, or go with a three+ blade. Shave after showering, use a coarse bristle brush to spread the cream.

Cheers,
lance

Chris Taylor said...

I started with blades, then moved to electric in my mid-teens, and moved back to blades in my twenties. The electrics didn't generate a lot of ingrown hairs for me, but they did seem ineffectual. My beard has a lot of 'whorls' in it where the hairs do not always point in the same direction/grain, and electrics do not seem to deal well with them.

On the other hand, if he really slices the crap out of himself with a blade, there's always styptic pencils. They will immediately shut off the bleeding (with some stinging), but without the need for applying tissue papier-mache to the wounds. The pencils are readily found at drugstores everywhere.