Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Today I dyed part of Chloe’s hair blue.

Here’s proof:

In the “Book of Parenting” that lists all of the things that you will likely do at some point or another during your time as a parent, this was unlisted.

It was the first time I took on a task of this nature and likely the last. I also didn’t do this alone. My wife helped a lot and Julianna helped with the final rinse.

To those of you who have never done this before, let me lay out the steps because when you’ve got some of the obsessive/compulsive tendencies that I have, its pretty important to really understand ALL of the steps:

1. Be a little bit crazy
2. Have time on your hands (thanks COVID-19)
3. Find the section in the grocery store where the hair dye kits are and figure out what the hell you’re looking at and the differences between 35 different shades of brown and the 1 blue.
4. FaceTime your daughter to make sure you get the right thing for fear of the wrath you’ll incur if you don’t
5. Get embarrassed looks from other shoppers who are trying to maintain a reasonable distance but are so fascinated by what they are witnessing that they can’t help but watch
6. Fake laugh after you hang up and said shoppers give you a pity “oh that’s so cute”
7. Get home and feel a moment of success when your daughter validates that you not only got the necessary groceries, but you also got the correct hair dye
8. Pick the time when this whole thing is going down
9. Take a Xanax
10. Have a pep talk with your daughter and let her know that this is the first time you’ve done this and there will be no complaints if and when it goes bad and that you’ll be doing the best you can and she will have to sit really still for a long time and she can’t get mad at you no matter what happens and by the way, if it does go bad, no problem, we’ll just cut off the ruined hair
11. Have another pep talk with your daughter reminding her of what you just told her so that she really understands because the last time, even though you said it out loud, was really for YOU and not for her
12. Get a trash bag and throw up in it
13. Get another trash bag and make a hole in the bottom and holes in the sides for her head and arms
14. Brush out her hair
15. Wrap a piece of masking tape (my wife’s great idea) around the hair at the line where you want to stop coloring
16. Breathe
17. Put the gloves on that come with the kit (you’ll see why in a second)
18. Make the bleach concoction and panic because the instructions say that once you mix it, if you haven’t already cut the tip off the bottle, you better hurry because it might blow up
19. Panic more because it then says that you have 2 minutes to Mission: Impossible that shit all over her hair making you think you’re going to start a fire if you don’t…
20. …and also, don’t touch it, don’t smell it, don’t get it on your clothes, your face, your scalp, your arms, her arms, her scalp, her face, her clothes, your counter, the chair, the floor, the dog, the sink, the ceiling, the walls, or anything else because it will burn holes in things
21. Reflect for the briefest of seconds on what happens if any of those things happen and why anyone would want to go through this effort to just “prime” the hair
22. Apply (with your wife’s help) the explosive bleach concoction to area below the tape line as fast as you can but also very slowly as to not do any of the things listed in #20 because like it said, you only have 2 minutes before the world ends
23. Stop holding your breath
24. Finish painting the hair and then set a timer for 10 minutes but, and I can’t emphasize this enough, do not let it go even a second over 10 minutes for fear of totally ruining her hair forever, or something
25. Walk around your kitchen with your gloves still on but your hands up in the air as if you’re about to enter an operating room because your gloves have bleach on them and you need the gloves for the next part and you don’t have other gloves
26. Ask Alexa how many more minutes are left on the FUCKING timer about 50 times
27. When the timer goes off, get the hair under the sink, get the masking tape off, run some “lukewarm” water, as if a sink can actually do anything other than cold or piping hot, and rinse that bleach out
28. Black out
29. Ask someone (my wife in this case) to blow dry the hair so its totally dry, because according to the instructions, its strictly forbidden to move on to the next step unless the hair is bone dry
30. Continue to pace around the kitchen with your operating room pose while you wait for what feels like an eternity to get the patient back in the chair
31. With the patient back in the chair, now with dry hair, get that tape back on her head, just a tiny bit above the bleach line, so you can paint the real stuff on
32. Give the pep talk one last time because, this is it
33. Shake that Electric Blue bottle for a minute to make sure its the right consistency
34. Start squeezing that color all over the hair
35. Worry that you won’t have enough color to get to all the hair leaving your child looking like a zebra
36. Do it delicately at the beginning because you don’t want to miss a single hair
37. Evolve to splattering it all over the area to be covered and using your hands to just smear Electric Blue everywhere
38. Have someone come check your work and make sure you haven’t missed anything
39. You’ve missed things
40. Go over the areas again and again
41. Fend off your wife when she suggests that we also paint Chloe’s eyebrows blue
42. Keep painting until you feel like you’re about to pass out
43. Pass out
44. Come to and realize that you are just about finished
45. Finish and set another timer for 45 minutes and order your daughter to sit still with her iPad and NOT do TikTok moves
46. Finally take the stupid gloves off
47. Pick up the bottle of color and throw it away
48. Immediately realize you should have left the gloves on for that part because now you’re a doofus and have Electric Blue on your hand
49. Thanks to your obsessive/compulsive stuff, drop everything you’re doing and get help finding vinegar and/or nail polish remover and get that Electric Blue off of your hand
50. Expose bone because you’ve cleaned your hand so hard
51. Wait
52. Wait
53. Wait more
54. When the timer is up, rinse and shampoo the hair again
55. Ask someone (my wife in this case) to blow dry the hair
56. Be told you can’t see the outcome because she wants a “big reveal”
57. Get the big reveal
58. See how happy she is
59. Sit down to eat dinner
60. Watch her rush through her dinner…
61. So she can FaceTime her friends to show them her hair
62. Don’t see her the rest of the night

See? In just 62 easy steps, you too can feel totally insane.