This post is actually about TWO bad haircuts. One of them I actually had a hand in myself – but I’m getting ahead of the story.  It all starts with our Great Pyrenees puppy, Cloud Bear.

There’s a spot of cool weather now, but just last week it was hot, really hot.  There were some days there where the heat was so intense, Cloudy spent most the day going between a water trough and some mud in the shade. In between, she dug up the flower beds and laid on them trying to get cooled off.

I love the Pyrenees temperament, but they are not really adapted for Florida with so much wooly, shaggy hair.

With our old dog, Belle, I would wait until early May to trim her coat, but it’s been so hot, so early (and I am almost out of zinnias to replant the flower beds), I thought it would be a good idea to give Cloudy an early haircut.

She loved it.  The attention, the grooming.  I tried my best, and I think it was the best job possible with a hyperactive puppy, dull scissors, and two little girls “helping”.  Anyway, I said to myself when she was bare in the middle with mangy bits about her neck and tail, “is the dog really going to care about her haircut?”  It’s not like we’re bringing her to a dog show – she’s not even going off the farm.  Surely she won’t mind.

When it was all over (no, I didn’t feel up to trimming the tail), she jumped around even crazier than she had been while I was trying to trim her, rolled in the piles of cut fur, and dashed into the water trough we call “Cloudy’s Cold Plunge”.  Then it dawned on her that something was different.  Very different.  She suddenly looked sad and depressed.  She got out of the cold plunge and trotted over to the cool sand near the gigantic pit Mirin dug, flopped down, rested her chin on her paws, and looked at me with her ears all scrunched up, a look that had been her cute, sad puppy dog eyes, but just looks funny now that all her fur is gone.  I realized that she actually hated her haircut.

It took us a few days to get used to it, too.  Mirin was staying with a friend for a few days during The Haircut, and when he got back he screamed when he first saw her.  I felt so sorry and missed our cute, fluffy puppy.  And she still dug up the flower beds!

The next bad hair cut hit a few days later.  Rose had done a fancy French braid in Clothilde’s hair. It didn’t get taken out before her shower that evening, and her hair was badly tangled.  We got set up with a stack of books, the hair brush and some almond oil to comb the tangles out, but when I undid the braid, I realized something was wrong.  Her hair looked way longer than I knew it was.  I started combing, and was horrified to find handfuls of hair brushing away.

“Did you cut your hair?” I gasped in horror.

“Yes,” she announced matter-of-factly. “I took the scissors and went snip, snip!” She went on to explain that they had been playing a game where they pin pine needles into their hair and pretend they have green hair.  Clothilde decided it would be fun to trim the pine needles, and accidentally sheared half her hair off.

It’s new-wave, sort of punk, actually.  To quote Calvin and Hobbes, in some places, it’s sort of like a mowhawk. She has so much hair already, it just looks like a slightly thinner mane on one side of her head.

And pigtails do a fairly good job of hiding the bald patch.