Kobi Has a New Friend

Disclaimer: this post is a little...well, maybe a lot, creepy. Just so you have a heads up. No pun intended.

My eight year-old son likes to do hair.

Wow. It's so freeing to just come out and say that.

He's always been fascinated by it - combing out old Barbies, stealing his sister's hair ties, learning how to tease - you know. He's even gone so far as to arrange various types of laundry in jaunty 'dos on his head. Beehives made out of t-shirts, dishtowels for long, flowing locks...he's even braided bathrobe ties and given himself pigtails.

I'm sure you get the idea. He's a tad obsessed. Once he went on the computer, googled "french braiding", followed the links to YouTube and replayed said searched-for video too many times to count until he - at the age of eight - taught himself how to french braid.

Now, bear in mind that Kobi is struggling with his education. Math is NOT his friend. In third grade, he's getting way behind. Yet, he manages to search for, find, and implement instructions on weaving hair that most moms can't follow.

It gets weirder.

My older son, Kris, is getting married this summer to Kami, who just finished hair school. She has these styling mannequin heads for practice laying around her car. Kobi saw them and became - you guessed it - obsessed. All he could talk about was those heads. We tried a trial run to see how he handled them (because it's taken almost a year to get him to stop braiding his t-shirts), and predictably, it wasn't pretty.

Not only did he do "her" hair, he named "her" Viola, carried "her" around cradled in his arm all day, took "her" outside and stuck her on the fence (I kid you not), and, he had deep and meaningful conversations with her. WAY too freaky for this mom.

So, the mani-head went into timeout. Indefinitely. Like solitary confinement for life.

Meanwhile, Kobi's been working on a deeply personal matter that only occurs at night and requires the use of special night time items in order to keep his sleeping area...shall I say, dry?

This has been an ongoing source of much conflict with no apparent end in sight. I mean, he could go on his honeymoon needing pullups. SOOOO, being the on the ball mom that I am, I put two and two together and came up with a "reward" (and by reward I mean bribe) that I thought might finally do the trick: any morning he wakes up dry, he gets the mani-head.

Yep, I went there.

It's been months and months. TONS of wet laundry, etc., but Kobi has now managed four, yes four, dry nights. Not in a row, but hey - any progress is awesome in my book. His future bride will probably appreciate it, too.

Now the mani-head is back in the picture. And the funny part is, he's not quite as enamored with her. Yes, he still talks to her and smuggles her out to the yard, and yes, he sleeps with her next to him and GI Joe...but I'm afraid the honeymoon is over. I've seen him swinging her around by the hair out in the yard like the hammer in some grotesque track and field event.

If he's upping the ante in this payment for no pee deal, what the heck is bigger and more desirable than a mannequin head of your very own? Bubble gum?

Pray for me.