What we do for fun in Port Moody

I was on my way to a meeting after work, when my cell phone rang. It was my daughter, honestly frantic. When I got her to slow down so I could understand, she told me that my husband was torturing her with shaving.

Before you assume something really reprehensible, here's what happened. My husband stopped shaving during the week that he took off to stay home with the kids over spring break. He hates shaving. Most of the time, to look really good, he has to do it twice a day. I am not exaggerating when I say he can grow a full beard in a week, which is what he did. He is also creative, so he played around with the shape of it as the week went by, and shaved it into the boring, predictable goatee that about 99% of the beard-growing male population ages 30 and older is sporting these days. I wasn't crazy about it, but I knew not to worry. For my husband, a beard is for fun, and for torturing anyone who is easily ruffled, like our 11 year old girl.

I remember when we were first married. My husband had a full beard at the time. A 1970s beard. Never mind it was 1984, he had one. I think he grew it one day on his lunch hour. Anyway, I was having a nap one Sunday afternoon and I woke up to find him sitting beside me, waiting for me to wake up. He looked at me and said, "Which side do you like?" He had shaved one side of his beard and mustache off completely and left the other intact. He had one clean-face profile and one beard and mustache profile. I told him I liked the beard side just to bug him. "Okay," he replied, "It'll grow back pretty quick."

So tonight he pulled the same kind of thing on our daughter, whose worst fear is that we will embarass her. He shaved the boring goatee into a very exciting and awful looking fu manchu mustache. She was begging him to shave it, so he went outside and talked to all the neighbours. You can imagine her horror. He also promised that he would drive her and her 3 friends to rehearsals tomorrow with the fu manchu mustache. That's about when she called me. "MAKE HIM SHAVE IT OFF!" All I could do was laugh and tell her that it would get worse before it got better. She made him get on the phone and we discussed how to further horrify her, including promising to grow long handlebars and twirl them with wax. I suggested mutton chops as a follow-up. Then I turned off my phone.

By the time I got home I had a clean-faced man and a relieved daughter. Sometime between the phone call and 9pm, he shaved off the top half of one side and the bottom half of the other side of the fu manchu to make an asymmetrical bonsai face of some sort. I think our daughter eventually caught on that he was playing with her, and relaxed.

I pointed out that she missed a golden opportunity to take pictures of the various stages and make them into an animated short with the computer. She's really good at that kind of thing. Now she wants him to grow it again and start over with the shaving so she can make her own face hair art movie.

So now you know what we do for fun in Port Moody on a Tuesday night.

Question - does it get any better?

mompoet - bride of wolfman