Hair-Cut Day!

Today started off as a typical Monday...which means it started off slow. Around here, we try not to plan too much on Mondays. It's a catch-up day from the weekend...and, for me, it's a day to prepare for the week. Holly was off of nursing school today, and we had made plans to hang out. I suggested to Jim that he take her to lunch, just the two of them. Those times are rare.

Plus, there is a new Thai restaurant in town that he's been dying to try...and she said she was up for it.

I decided to take Joshua to get his hair-cut during this time. He'd been asking about it for a week. We go to a Sports Clips near our house. There is a girl there named HOPE, and she cuts Joshua's hair. If Ms. Hope is not there, we leave and come back when she is. Joshua loves Ms. Hope.

When we moved here, we went to several different places to get Joshua's hair cut...trying to find a place we liked. We are intentional about forming relationships with people, but it works both ways. The other party has to be accepting of that, too.

And, I am over people who want my business...but make no attempt to keep it...who, in this case, will let Joshua sit in the chair and cut his hair and not say ONE WORD to him the entire time. One girl was so rough with him, it was all I could do to not go in there and say something. Good heavens. You aren't the only show in town, people. Life is too short, and Joshua loves getting his hair-cut too much, for me to take him somewhere where he is treated like an outcast.

No ma'am.

Not having that.

But, we found Ms. Hope, and she and Joshua hit it off immediately.

We get a "hair-cut only." We had to make this distinction because of an "incident" that happened one time. I wrote about this before, but I'm too lazy to look it up and link it here. 

I had taken a seat in a place where I couldn't easily see Joshua and Ms. Hope. I looked up periodically and peered around to make sure things were okay. Joshua is a MAN, and I don't want to make him feel like a baby by hovering over him. But, one time I looked up and he was gone. I could not see him anywhere. I knew there was a back part to the business...where the bathrooms and stuff were (don't even get me started on how I have to fight to keep myself from hyperventilating when he goes in the men's room by himself). I was just fixin' to ask someone where he was, when he came out from the back room with Ms. Hope. He was grinning from EAR TO EAR. I said, "Joshua! Where'd you go?" He LOUDLY and excitedly said, "she showered me!"

Ms. Hope said that he'd earned a "spa treatment" (NOT A SHOWER!) because he'd gotten a certain number of hair-cuts.

Everyone had a good laugh over it. 

Joshua loved the "spa treatment" so much that he asks about it all the time. So, now when we go, he will say, "hair-cut only...no showers."

I love when people treat Joshua like a PERSON. Like an EQUAL. Who engage him and interact with him. When we walk into "our" Sports Clips, everyone smiles and says, "HI, JOSHUA!"

It blesses my heart to no end...and I just know it makes God smile as well.

"'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.'" Matthew 25:40