My family and I just started to move into our new house. My older sister, Ashley, and I were around six and four years old. I was a little child with soft blonde, shoulder length hair. We had moving boxes scattered all around our house and everything was in heaving pile. My sister and I were left to play upstairs while my parents cleaned up the kitchen. Ashley and I were running around laughing and I heard the constant thump of our small feet hitting the soft carpet. My sister had pulled some sticky notes out of a small moving box and was drawing on them with some new markers. I fail to remember how, but after a while I had gotten multiple sticky notes stuck in my hair. I remember looking in the mirror, my eyebrows scrunching together creating little lines in my forehead. I was very confused on how they had ended up there. My tiny fingers reached up to touch my hair and started to pull them out. The scratchy sound of the sticky notes against my hair caused goosebumps to appear on my arms. I shivered and again went to pull them out. A sudden sharp pain scatter across my head and I saw my hair was wrapped around the sticky notes and poking out in all directions. It hurt to much too pull out and I had no other ideas for a way to get them out of my hair. Then, an idea came to my head. I could cut them out! Who could I ask? My parents were busy; who better than my loving sister.

“Hey Ashley, can you help me?” I asked, holding out some cheap, plastic scissors and pointing to my crazy hair.
“I guess,” she said, “wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” She ran down the stairs and seconds later I heard her stomping back up. As she came around the corner, I wondered, what in the world would she want to get?
“Ok! All ready!” she grinned and held up a small shiny plastic plate. “Oh, this? It’s for your hair. Sit down here,” she pointed to a spot in the carpet and as always, I did what she said, “Stay still Leanna.”

“Ok.” I felt a small tug and heard the sharp noise of scissors opening. I could feel the scissors moving closer to my head, even though I couldn’t see it. Before I knew it, my sister stuck her hand out from behind me, grasping chunks of my hair.

“I didn’t even feel it!” I exclaimed, “Keep cutting them out,” I demanded. After a couple of long grueling minutes of me sitting on the floor my sister had finally finished.

“All done!” She said. I turned around and looked down at the plate. Chunks of hair and sticky notes were scattered across the plate and some were falling off the edges and onto the carpet. I turned around and ran to the bathroom mirror to see my new hairdo. I paused at the door, took a deep breath and slowly stepped into the bathroom. It looked awful. It was a scraggly mess; long on one side, short and choppy on the other. I bounded down the stairs to show my mom. The look on her face was a mixture of horror and surprise. She said nothing so I ran back upstairs and kept on playing with my sister like nothing had even happened. I felt free of the sticky notes that had been holding me back from playing with my sister.

The next day we went to the hair salon and I left with a short, boy cut hairstyle. I also learned that my sister had hid my hair in moving boxes, drawers, basically everywhere. Over the next few weeks my mom and dad randomly found clumps of my hair around our house. During those weeks, I learned to love it. I got many compliments about my new, short hair and I learned that what I once thought was a bad thing might not be so bad after all.