Pierced ears

This subject is being discussed on a few other blogs and online forums so I'm popping this old post to the top of my blog to save time and not have to retype it.

(I'm moving it back to the original spot on the blog.  The can of worms is just too wormy.)

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I almost always avoid controversial topics on this blog so I hope I'm not sticking my neck out with this one. Here's the deal:  I'm not going to pierce my daughters ears until they're both old enough to plead with me in full, grammatically correct, sentences to do it.    They don't care about beauty at this age.  Heck, they'd just as happily wear an ridiculous Elmo Band-aide plastered across their forehead as a pair of glimmering sapphire earrings!  But Maddy does seem to love her pretty earrings (she loves to copy Mommy).  They're the stick-on kind.  We got 400 of them for about $9.99 at Target (in the cell phone area as they're supposed to add "bling" to your phone).  They stick really well and she always touches them to make sure they're still there.  Oddly enough, Gwen (my Sticker Queen) absolutely won't wear them.  But Maddy gets a new pair every morning after her bath. I understand that ear piercing is a cultural thing for many families but for my family (and here in San Jose) it's nothing special so it's easy to not subject our very young daughters to the discomfort of having it done and keeping the holes clean and free from infection.  When they're older, I expect that they'll want to have their ears pierced and that will be fine.

This is our 18 year old son, Michael.  He's had his ears pierced since he was six but he BEGGED me (in grammatically correct sentences) to let him do it and we had a deal that he could if he make Honor Roll in school -- and he did! So I held up my end of the deal. For many years, we had strict rules about how large the holes could be.  All through High School, he challenged us and would periodically sneak in larger earrings (that I always noticed).  We'd make him remove them before bestowing any privledge upon him so we were able to keep the holes smaller than a pencil lead.  But the instant he turned 18 and moved into the dorm at college, he put these large things in his ears.

I am grateful that our challenges with raising him haven't involved anything much more serious than the size of his earrings but I'm disappointed that he did this to his ears.  As his mom, I remember how beautiful and perfect his earlobes were when he was a baby.    Oh well, at least it's not a tatoo!