Torsten/picture catchup #1: The story of a dress, hair butchery, and getting soaked in Germany…

Ok, so here’s the first set of many pictures and Torsten-related things I intend to get up soon – one thing at a time.

Anyhow…

Part 1: The dress

Once upon a time there was a dress. The wearer wasn’t particularly fashion conscious, but it was a nice dress, and it did quite well when she decided to marry an Evil German Guy:

(More below the cut, for those of you who can actually *see* the cut…)

Anyhow, so that was my wedding dress. I’m not a particularly sentimental person when it comes to things, and I have to admit, I was getting tired of moving the thing from place to place to place. It’s not as if I intended to use the thing again, but I felt sort of guilty about the idea of parting with it.

Well, then Torsten was born, and we decided we’d have him baptized in Germany while we were there last summer so that his German family could take part. The problem that arose was that Torsten is, as you may know, a big baby, and by the time we went to Germany, he was already more than eight months old. While we’d been offered the christening outfit that Christian and his sister were baptized in, we were pretty sure it wouldn’t fit.

And so I, she of not-very-good sewing skills and the bane of Gracia Willis’s Home Ec class in the 8th grade, decided to do something really scary.

It started like this:

Now, as I said, I’m not very sentimental about these things, but it did seem a little sacrilegious.

But, of course, that wasn’t really enough to get done what I intended to do, so…

Ok, so at this point, the damned thing was dead. There was, I admit, something that was actually a bit satisfying about tearing the thing to bits which had nothing to do with me marrying the Evil German Guy ™ and everything to do with wedding-related drama, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, so what followed was many days of me cutting and hacking and generally scaring the crap out of myself.

And somehow, my wedding gown turned into this:

Now, keep in mind, I do know that my son is a boy, but I figured that if I was going to do something oddly traditional (in spite of it not being white), I might as well do it right. The gown itself is not nearly as girlie as the pattern specified, but I’m also not one who, for example, gets too hung up on blue clothes and trucks and what not, if you know what I mean. I just wanted to make something that, if my kid wanted to keep it and use it for his (enormous) children, he could. And I wanted it to be something that was made for him.

By the way, if you ever do go looking for christening clothes for a boy, let me just say that some of the patterns out there for boys are butt-ugly jumpers and weird little outfits and… well, I liked this better, in any event.

Anyhow, here’s the back:

And closeups of the top:

There’s also a little cap that was supposed to go along with it, but I didn’t make it for two reasons – 1) I ran out of time before we had to fly to Germany, and 2) we decided our son’s (at the time) soft, fuzzy reddish-blonde hair that had grown in after all of his thick dark-brown baby hair fell out was really nice, and we wanted to show that off. Well, then there was 3) which is that we didn’t know if it would be too warm. But mostly it was 2).

This, however, leads us to:

Part 2: Hair butchery

What we had not counted on was Oma deciding, during Mama’s four days in London, that Torsten’s hair so urgently needed chopping off because “it was in his eyes” that a big chunk needed to be lopped off the front. Artful brushing eventually made it sort of ok, but…

Let me preface this by saying I’m certainly not mad about this anymore. That would be dumb. Forewarned for next time, perhaps, but certainly not upset. But the story… well, is almost funny if you’re not me

Maybe this is something culturally different in Germany. Maybe it’s generational. But American mothers, let me pose you this situation, and see what you think – you’ve never taken your child for a haircut before, and he really (by your judgement) doesn’t need one yet because, quite frankly, his hair is easy to brush aside in the morning and you rather like the way he looks anyway. You know that one day soon you will decide to take him for one, but you know this is your choice, and so you don’t worry about it. It’s not like you haven’t seen your child every day of his life and don’t know every little quirk of it from gently smoothing it over his forehead as you put him to sleep every night.

And you know that for mommies, American mommies at least, the first haircut is something special. You save a lock of it, maybe put some of it into your child’s scrapbook, because it’s just one of those things we do.

Now, I have to be fair here – I did warn my husband rather vehemently before I left not to let Oma cut my kid’s hair. I did this partly because it’s something I suspect my own mother would do (“better to ask for forgiveness than permission when something really bugs you and you know you’re supposed to leave it alone” was sort of her motto when it came to her kids, anyway), and partly because mother-in-laws always know better than you do. Didn’t you know that?

It’s usually ok, but sometimes it just makes me want to scream.

So, with this in mind, imagine you come home from London to your in-laws place almost a day early because you’ve missed your baby so much (you’ve never spent even a whole day away from him, so it’s a little rough), and at first you’re just thrilled because he crawls over to you when you get there. He was not crawling when you left (though he was close), so you’re pretty much just bouncing from that. But that night, as you are lying next to him to put him to sleep in the bed upstairs, you notice something as you’re stroking his soft baby hair. There’s this strange, blunt line where some of his hair is shorter than the rest.

To wit…

Picture 1, taken a couple of weeks before this happened while we were in Finland:

See? Cute, easy to brush, fuzzy. Mmmm fuzzy baby head.

Picture 2, taken a couple of weeks after this happened and we’d returned (and right when I decided I had to take him for a haircut) – this is one of the few where I hadn’t tried to cover the hack up in one way or another:

You think you’re going nuts at first – after all, there’s been a lot of stress with your in-laws over the years and you’re probably just being stupidly paranoid. So you put him to bed, and then you think… you know, I don’t want to let this bug me, so I’ll just go ask my husband.  He’ll tell me I’m smoking crack, and I’ll be relieved.

Except that he didn’t, and I wasn’t, because really, who cuts someone else’s kid’s hair???

And so I ask you, American mommies… would you be ok with this? Because I was so totally not. I was actually rather calm when I talked to my in-laws, basically just telling them I noticed they’d done it and not to do it again, but seriously… NOT OK.

Lots of stupid drama followed anyway that I won’t get into, but to make a long story short (or to end a long story that’s already too long), I just decided to write it off in my own head as an “accident” when it came to getting his first real haircut, especially since it was just a chunk out of the front (!!??!!!!), and although going capless didn’t look quite as planned, Mr. T was still übercute, because, you know, he’s Mr. T.

Anyhow, we now get to the happy part, which is:

Part 3: Getting soaked in Germany

Ok, so this isn’t all that exciting for most people, and I’ll let the pictures tell most of the story, but we went down to the village Torsten’s great aunt, great grandmother, and (now) godfather all live in, and Torsten was baptised in the 15th century chapel which is only open once a year during their village festival, which, by pure chance, was the day we were there. The townspeople were very accomodating, and the priest was very nice to have done it even though we don’t live there. He was really quite kind.

I look stupid in all of these pictures, because I was too tired to care about what I looked like (and frankly, still looked pregnant, only much squishier, but I really, really didn’t care at the time). It was about Torsten, not me.

At this point, we interrupt this stream of pictures with a German Catholic baptism and an unhappy baby, already in progress (N.B.: Password protected to keep out of the dirty paws of search engines – type “smurf” in to see the video. Experience the use of the German genitive in all of its grammatical glory!):

I could write a bunch of stuff there, but the pictures are enough, I think. Torsten handled it pretty well, though he got hungry mid-service and cried, because that’s what babies do Mama was exhausted and wanted to cry, but Mamas don’t get to do that at family functions