My son has hair

My son has hair. He has what, to me, is a pretty standard little boy hair cut. Longish, shaggy, a hair cut I see in the childrens' sections of sales flyers all the time.  I never knew it was so controversial to have a little boy with hair.
I have been told he looks like a girl, which is ironic because people told me Ryan looked like a boy until her hair was well past her shoulders.  And I hear an awful lot of "I would never let my son have long hair," online.  But the little kids with short hair, they all look like they're ready for church, all prim and proper. My son's hair moves, it gets blown by the wind, it swings and bounces when he laughs.  And it's not that I'm too lazy to have it cut. It would be MUCH easier to have it all sheared off  or to cut it short enough to have room to grow between cuts than to go get his bangs cut out of his eyes every month (he is not good with hair cuts).  But to cut his hair off now would age him so much and I'm not ready for that. He doesn't have to look like a little man. He can look like a little boy for as long as he wants (and by the way, I live by a junior high and a high school and I see dozens of teenage boys with floppy hair walk by the house every day. It worries me, since I have a 13 year old daughter who has a penchant for teenage boys with floppy hair.).  And if Tommy wants to cut his hair short someday, I will let him, and he'll have a hell of a lot more to work with than if I'd kept it short.  But he's three. He doesn't need to apply for a job, or look professional, and no one under 60 has ever mistaken him for a girl (and those were both people who kept their boys' heads shaved in the summer so I think they may have said it on purpose to make a point. An assholey point.)

It tastes better than it sounds

You know that thing where you look up one thing (usually for me on wikipedia) and then click a related link to read something else, then click a related link, and on and on, until you end up on an unrelated or minimally related topic? Everyone does that, right? It's not just me. Anyway, I looked up the word hotdish (Minnesotan for a type of casserole), then had to compare hotdish to casserole (all hotdishes are casseroles but not all casseroles are hotdishes), then ended up looking up comfort food, and I realized that there is no specific list of comfort foods. It's very subjective.

I guess comfort food, as a general term, refers to things like meatloaf and pot roast and mac & cheese. But it also varies by region, by family, and by person. In my family, believe it or not, a biggie is macaroni milk & butter. That's what comes out of the depression when you have a chicken for eggs (to make noodles) and a cow (for milk and butter) and it literally is just cooked macaroni, a stick of butter melted on it, and then milk. Like a soup, but not. Odd, I know.

I like comfort food. I've never really been one to eat for comfort, but there's something about sitting down to a big plate of parsley noodles (it's what you eat for dinner when you can't stand Mom's stroganoff) or some Rice A Roni (fine, my mom sucked at cooking). I make more classic comfort food now, like baked mac and cheese where the top gets all brown and bubbly, and red wine pot roast, and every morning I sit down with a hot bowl of cinnamon oatmeal. But on nights when Tom's out on the road, I still fall back on the food from my family, the things I remember from when I was a kid. I still pour milk on my macaroni.