Parenting tips with your trim and wash?

It’s like this cult of par­ent­ing, this club of happy enthu­si­as­tic peo­ple who’ve been so nice and wel­com­ing to Naomi and I ever since they’ve known Naomi was expecting.

There have been ran­dom acts of kind­ness and com­pletely unso­licited advice from com­plete strangers — “this baby nail scis­sors is really good, you should get it”; well-wishes, con­grat­u­la­tions and light-hearted warn­ings about the lack of sleep that we’ll be expe­ri­enc­ing in the com­ing months.

Yes­ter­day was even fun­nier. Not least because Naomi and I decided we needed to get our hair cut because we thought it would be months before we’d have time for another trim, and brought her mum along for the ride.

So it was fam­ily day at Next Salon at Hol­land Vil­lage, where I’ve been get­ting my hair cut sev­eral times a year for the last 9 years now.

You’d never imag­ine the estab­lish­ment to be so, given its Wall­pa­peresque decor and 99.5FMesque music, but before the first strand of hair was sham­pooed or cut, the par­ent­ing tips came good and fast from our styl­ists Cheryl and Jerry, new par­ents themselves.

Dia­pers, feeds, clothes; Nurs­ery, cry­ing, sleep; You could fill an entire after­noon talk­ing. And as Cheryl quipped, “remem­ber the days when all you wanted to do was go one cor­ner and smoke when your friends started talk­ing about kids?”

And when the other senior styl­ist Jonathan (not a par­ent) came by to say hi and ask where exactly the car mechanic’s work­shop I rec­om­mended pre­vi­ously was, I drew a blank for a good minute before my brain switched modes.

We talk babies these days, Jonathan. Not cars, not any­thing else. But you can join the club.