When the walls...

...come tumblin' down
When the walls come crumblin' crumblin'
When the walls come tumblin' tumblin' down.
-John (Cougar) Mellencamp, Crumblin' Down

It's not often that I take vacation on a random Tuesday morning.  But it's not too often that this happens next door:

And it's not too often that you get to see your tool-wielding, construction-loving 3 year old completely utterly transfixed.

 (Whoa!)

 Our neighbors are rebuilding, putting 2 houses on the lot where this sweet little 1950's ranch stood this morning.  And I took half a day off just so the little man and I could watch the demolition.  And boy did we watch!  We parked ourselves in the sunshine of our front yard and watched it come crashing down.

 (He would have sat in that spot for HOURS!)

(We even recruited LaLa to come over - set her up in a comfy chair 

in the yard so that she could join in on the fun, too!)

 (The supervisor at work.)

(When will you stop with the plants and start working on the HOUSE?!)

I know that normal people use their vacation days to go to the beach or DisneyWorld.  But after seeing how excited that little boy was about this house demolition, I am 100% certain that Disney has NOTHING on a construction site, particularly one right next door.  He was absolutely enthralled.  When it got boring (which eventually it did, even for him!), he started using sticks to "tear down" weeds in the yard.  I feel sure the kid will eventually go into construction management or civil engineering, though I'm pretty sure he'd be far more excited to be the guy driving the backhoe.  The look on his face was priceless - he was completely in his element.  It was one of the most fun days I've had in a very, very long time.

Things are crazy in my life right now - worrying about my mom, worrying about the future, worrying about what's not getting done, trying to coordinate too much.  I've tried mentally blogging about it, but I just can't quite get the words out.  Maybe that's because I just don't want the world to know my vulnerabilities. The figurative walls are crumblin' down in my life, and I'm really struggling to keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

So, today was a much needed break - to literally watch some walls tumblin' down.  More importantly, I spent the morning doing something just because I wanted to ...completely forgetting about the things I ought to do. 

Good stuff.  

So, I promise to keep you updated on the progress of the new house that gets built next door.  Because the pint-size supervisor will demand that we go by to check out the progress every evening from now until they lock the doors and hand it back over to the neighbors.

She asks me why I'm just a hairy guy...

...I'm hairy noon and night
Hair that's a fright
I'm hairy high and low
Don't ask me why
Don't know


Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair
-"Hair" the Musical

Since my sweet Luke grew more hair than the infant peach fuzz he had at birth, he's had crazy hair.  It's been that funny, fuzzy, stick-y up in all directions mane that you've come to giggle about.  It's tough to describe, but it is certainly something to smile over.

 New Year's Eve, 2011
Just like Rufio from "Hook" ... perhaps we should go red and black.
Could work for our little Wolfpacker!

Now, there's plenty of stuff out here on the interwebs that isn't quite what it appears to be.  Pictures are cropped and photoshopped until they barely resemble the real life image the camera captured.  Not so with these photos, I promise.  These are original, untouched craziness. In fact, pictures rarely do justice to the insanity that is dear Luke's hairdo. And there's no static involved.  No hair products could do this on purpose.  It's 100%, all natural, crazy baby hair.

 

I think this was as long as it ever got - Thanksgiving 2010

 

Trimmed up, but crazy as ever - Feb 2011

Even when it's short, it stands straight out from his head - October 2011

Okay, so hair products were used one time to create his rock star locks for Halloween.

The front sticks up and forward, the sides go anywhere from straight out to semi-down, but on the crown of his head head, it's skyward, straight up, and sometimes curving up and then back.  And for those of you who don't know him in real life, it's touchable.  You can rub his head over and over, and it pops right back up.  In fact, even after a whole day of wearing a hat, it springs back out - like it's been begging to escape the hat for hours.

This is not nap hair.  This is just what it does.

Sometime in late summer or early fall, I decided that if it could just get enough length, it would become heavy enough to lay down.  I committed to letting it grow out until Thanksgiving.

We started getting more and more comments from random strangers at the grocery store.  "I just LOVE his hair!"  I'm not sure whether to believe them.  I think "I just LOVE his hair!" might be code for "OMG why on earth do you let him leave the house like that?!"  It definitely invites comments.  One 9ish year old kid in a restaurant came up to him, rubbed his head to be sure it really wouldn't lay down, then said "My hair was just like that when I was little!"  And I gotta admit, the boy's hair wasn't too far from that still.

The other fairly frequent comment that we get is "My (nephew/brother/son/insert-other-semi-distant-relative-here) had hair JUST like that at his age!!"  And my quick response is "So, did he grow out of it?!  Puhleaze tell me he did!"  I actually love hearing from those folks, because most are reassuring that by the time the kid was elementary age, his hair was pretty much laying down.  There's hope right?


Now, I will say, that we used some grownup shampoo (it claims to be "smoothing")  while we were visiting Derek's mom after Christmas.  It came as close to laying down that day as it ever has:

 

See!  Laying down on top, sticking out only on the sides and back.

But another wash with baby shampoo, and it's back to it's regular gig of standing on end.  We even tried a heavy duty leave in scalp moisturizer/conditioner.  If that much grease won't make it lay down, I don't know what will.

When it wasn't showing any signs of becoming more tame at Thanksgiving, I decided to let it go until Christmas. 

It's a little tough to tell in this pic because he was so squirmy, but his hair is easily 2 inches long.  And still standing on end, straight out from his head.  On New Year's Eve, I finally gave in and buzzed him again.  Short.  Sweet.  And sticking out in all directions once again.

But you know what my dear Gabby discovered (via "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me," no less!)?  There is an incurable genetic syndrome known as "Uncombable Hair Syndrome."  Oh yes.

Uncombable Hair Syndrome.  

The hair shaft has a groove in it that actually prevents it from laying down - the hair is triangular shaped.  To save you the effort of Googling it yourself - cause I *know* you were going to! - here are some images borrowed from the web:

Yep, looks an awful lot like my sweetheart's crazy locks, especially the one at the bottom.  Most of the kids in pics have hair that is more kinky - Luke's is actually pretty smooth.  So I'm not sure if he'd actually qualify from a diagnostic perspective, but he sure does from a description perspective.

Uncombable hair.  That's my boy.