Well it's official - we now have a daughter with 2 more holes in her head. Yes, after a year plus of telling her she had to wait until she was 8, her very consistent parents caved and let her pierce her ears at the ripe old age of 6 1/2. How and why you ask? Well, I'd like to tell you we had this lofty and worthwhile purpose behind it being done early, but honestly it came down to the fact that we just got tired of hearing about it and being begged to have it done every 5 seconds. Yes, she wore us down, sad but true. For anyone who actually knows Hailey, this will not come as a surprise. One thing we can say about her is that she is persistent if nothing else. Actually, it was really hard coming up with excuses when really, there was no sure fire reason why we had chosen the age of 8, other than the fact that we wanted her to be old enough to be responsible and to take care of them herself. And besides, once her cousin got hers done for her birthday in June, it was really only a matter of time.
We did however, make sure we got something out of the deal. We decided that we needed to combat some of the "not so desirable" behavioral issues we were experiencing at the time, so we used a sticker chart for her to earn her pierced ears. She had to earn 60 stickers for 60 days in order to get them done. She had to show us she was old enough to get her ears pierced by being old enough to act and behave appropriately. And even though we had a bit of a rocky start, she figured it out very quickly and the 60 days passed a lot faster than I thought they would.
So on July 28th, we headed off to the mall to get them done. Aunt Kylie met us there because Hailey wanted her to be the one to take her - she and her Aunt Kylie have this special earring bond. It's hard to explain, but I think it all started back with a pair of earrings Kylie wore that Hailey fell in love with. That led to Hailey buying Aunt Kylie fun, dangly earrings for her birthday (since her over-conservative mother would never wear any of those fun earrings). And eventually to the plan of Aunt Kylie taking her to get her ears pierced. The only reason I was there was to drive her and hand over my credit card to pay. Honestly, I was lucky she let me come at all - there were times when I was informed that I wasn't going to be going with them. That thought was probably my penance for having denied her getting her ears pierced for so long.
So here she is at the store, sitting in the chair, all ready for the piercing. She was a little bit nervous, but in all, I was really proud of how brave she was. I was worried she would back out at the last minute, but she never swayed from her goal.
The lady at the store asked me if I thought she was nervous and wouldn't want to do the second ear once the first was done. I told her I wasn't sure, so she had me hold a wallet with butterflies on it for her to concentrate on and count while she did it. Hailey was hilarious, her counting went something like this: "One, two, three, four, ow, five, six, seven, ow - oh we're done?" Yep, other than the two ow's, I never would have known anything had happened. And boy oh boy was she excited.
She was so happy, she walked around with a perma-grin for hours. She was so happy, I was almost sad that we didn't let her do it earlier - but don't tell her that! :)
We had a bit of a drive back home, so I handed her my little mirror to see her ears in the car and she looked and looked and looked at her newly pierced ears all the way home. I chuckled every time I looked in the rear view mirror and saw her staring at her ears.
One funny note that I have to make sure I include: When we got home, she told her dad that piercing her ears was a lot easier than she thought it would be. I had been telling her about the piercing gun and how it would push the earring through her ear (apparently they have changed the piercing method and now instead of a gun looking thing, it's a little boxy thing that squeezes together, a lot less intimidating). So when her Dad asked her why it was easier than she thought, she explained that she thought they lined her up against a wall and used a rifle to shoot a hole in her ear. We both about fell over laughing - how on earth she got that out of what I had explained I'll never know, but the imagination of a 6 year old is something you can never predict. But I will say this, she was extremely brave and courageous going into it with that idea of how it was going to work. She must have have wanted pierced ears pretty badly if she was willing to let them shoot a rifle at her.
So now that she has her ears pierced, she's now looking forward to the 6 week date when she can take these first ones out and switch them for ones of her choice. She's already got some picked out to wear that first day. All I can say is that her first choice are dangly feather earrings - some that Aunt Kylie bought her as a gift. That ought to look quite interesting!
