Buzz off!

"Long" and scraggly hair on my son.

 I wish I had a better picture to illustrate how scraggly my son's hair was looking.  This is the best I could find.  But it was from a couple of weeks ago.  We were actually having to make him brush it. In our family, we like SHORT hair on our boys.  And this picture is not considered short in our book.  We like it buzzed off!  So, for such an easy cut, we have the choice of taking them somewhere and paying $10-$20 to get it done OR buying a simple hair cutting kit for about $15 and doing it ourselves. 

Simple, but adequate hair cutting kit

 You might guess that we opted for the hair cutting kit.  My husband cuts his hair with the #1 comb and we cut my son's hair with the #3 comb.  It takes maybe 10 minutes and is extremely easy.  My son has probably 4 or 5 cowlicks, so that makes a little harder, but once we figured out to just come at it in several different directions, that made it much easier.  We make it a little shorter around the ears and use no comb on the back to straighten everything out. 

Dad doing the finishing touches

Using the vacuum

Another trick we learned was using the
vacuum while we cut.  Our son hates the hair all over him and we went to a barber a long time ago that had the shaver attached to a vacuum.  Remember the Flowbee? Instead of going out and buying a Flowbee (which we couldn't find for a long time), we just bring out the vacuum.  Either he holds it or one of us holds it while the other one cuts.  This makes for much less cleanup when the job is done too. 

Handsome and ready for the summer!

As for the girls in our family, we still go every couple of months to get our hair cut.  We do our own trimming of the bangs and when it is long enough, I trim the back of my daughter's hair.  On my list of things to learn is how to do "girlie" short hair cuts.  Until then, we at least save money on the boys' cuts!