I put it off as long as I could.

But when 17-month-old Jedidiah sported butterfly hairbows and a pony tail last weekend, I finally gave up and decided to let his dad do what he’s been begging to do for months:

Cut my baby’s hair.

Now, as a mother with three other children who are older than my “baby” is, I’ve been through this before. I know that once you get that wispy baby hair cut, your baby does NOT look like a baby anymore. It’s that simple.

So it’s easy to see why I wanted to put it off as long as possible.

Though I was in denial about him growing up, I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between my little cutie and a miniscule Billy Ray Cyrus. Minus the tight jeans, of course.

Jedidiah is your basic wiggle worm. I knew it would be a challenge to try and cut his hair ourselves – without cutting his ears, too, anyway. So we loaded everyone up in the car and headed to what the girls like to call “The Haircut Store” to leave the job up to a professional.

My girls have always LOVED to get their hair cut. They actually even asked if they could get theirs done the night we took Jedidiah. Three-year-old Adelaide informed the stylist, “I want you to cut mine long.”

In the end, however, we decided to let this be Jedidiah’s special night. Because there was no way to tie him to the chair, he ended up on his dad’s lap, covered with a teal blue cape printed with penguins and surfboards.

The look on his face was pure misery (because he was trapped and forced to be still for more than three seconds), followed by a “what the heck do you think you’re doing?” look at the lady with the spray bottle.

He sat remarkably, uncharacteristically still (possibly because his dad had a death grip on him underneath the cape), only turning his head once in a while to get a good look at those scissors as they snipped his golden baby wisps away.

His sisters and I kept him entertained with funny faces, little yogurt poofs and finally – the holy grail of toddlers – a watermelon-flavored sucker. He proceeded to savor every sweet taste of it. Since he’d never had one before though, he didn’t realize that at some point he was supposed to swallow, also.

Therefore, all of the yummy stickiness (aka juicy baby slobber) ended up dribbling out of his mouth, down his hand, all over his dad’s arm and eventually down his dad’s leg and into his shoe. I was glad that I was stationed as the picture-taker and not as the drool-catcher.

His dad didn’t like it very much; but it was, after all, Jedidiah’s very first sucker. He was not disappointed.

He didn’t even cry.

But I did.