I know what you are thinking. And you could not be more wrong. This was not one of my experiments. Neither did I confuse him with one of my dollhouse collections. Honest! This is entirely his fault.
Just so you know, he turned five recently. Lately, he has developed a heightened sense of adventure. The good/bad thing about the new sense is that it has no respect for gender boundaries. This means that if anything looks cool and dangerous enough, he’s going to try it, girly or not. If he is not climbing to the top of any cabinet to explore it’s hinges, he’s trying on his superman suit (which really is a sheet tied around his neck) and jumping off from relatively high places. At least he’s tall so I never have worry about him crawling under the bed to munch on poor roaches. Those were his toddling days. Take for example the eyebrow incident.
I am a do it yourself kind of person. This means that I prefer to wash my own hair, make my own nails, clip my own toe nails and yes, shave my own eyebrows. Shocking as it may sound, I’ve been known to doll myself up every now and then. Sometimes my boy is present during some of these activities. At such times, I like hearing his stories which although half the time they get so mixed up I am lost as to what we were talking about, they are always entertaining. He has been there during the eyebrow shaving moments. Several of them in fact. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would climb to the highest cabinet where I store such dangerous shaving equipment, grab one and actually attempt to shave his eyebrows. He did. I was shocked. I did not even think of appropriate punishment. Neither did I know whether to shape the eyebrows for him or just let them grow out, all patchy.
Had I not noticed the silence coming from the room where he was, I would not have been there in time to gasp and yell and try and explain to him why only mummy should have shaved eyebrows. He probably would have, God forbid, gone ahead and shaved off part of his hair and I can assure you, child welfare services would have been at my doorstep the following day. I have had to explain the eyebrows to a few people including his teachers, and conveniently prevented his grandmother from visiting my house but I can tell you, I am done getting surprised at stunts he is bound to pull. I am however more watchful because as amusing as some of these stunts are, I do realise that it could get quite dicey should he get himself into more dangerous ones. O yes. And I have dialed up explaining boy and girl things a notch. Also ‘dangerous and safe things’ lessons are in full force. All this without curtailing his sense of adventure or curiosity. Hopefully.
Diary of The Kenyan Mom 