Ears are pierced!

Wow, what an ordeal!

We went to the Piercing Pagoda at the mall yesterday to get Kenzie's ears pierced. Jia's ears are already pierced (one of the teachers at the orphanage did it.) I guess for every girl, at some time in her life, she goes through this rite of passage, from little girl to (in Kenzie's case) a bigger little girl. I didn't get my ears pierced until I was twenty. And then I did it the old-fashoined way - drink a pint of vodka and hold ice to my ears so when my cousin shoved a needle through them I (hopefully) wouldn't feel it. NOTE TO OTHERS: it doesn't work - you feel it anyway. Especially since she had to try it about three times on each ear - I have really thick cartilage in my ears.

Kenzie picked out the earrings she wanted to have her ears pierced with, and another pair she could wear once they had healed. After paying for the earrings, it was time to have her sit in the chair.

She got up there and then began to freak a little. They took alcohol wipes and cleaned her ears off, to which she sat with scrunched up shoulders. Then they took the marking pen to put the dots on her ears - and she again began to scrunch her shoulders and cried out a little. I explained to her that they had to mark where they were going to put her holes so they could give her a good piercing. Otherwise, they'd have to do it again and we only want to do it once.

Then they pulled out the "guns" that they use to pierce the ears with. That's when all hell broke loose. She screamed and then stood up on the edge of the chair and wrapped her arms around my neck in a choke hold and just kept crying and screaming...

It told her that if she wanted pierced ears then she had to have them put in with the equipment she saw. She screamed she didn't like the needle. After trying to calm her down a bit (with no luck) I picked her up out of the chair, put her down on the floor and told her if she didn't want her ears pierced today and wanted to wait until she was older, that was fine with me. I would go ahead and give the earrings to Jia.

She looked at me and said, "But can't you save them for me?"

I told her the earrings were for little girls, not older girls, and that since Jia had her ears pierced already, she could wear them. The earrings wouldn't fit her if she was 13.

It took her a few seconds. but you could see the wheels turning in her head, and by all things sacred she was not going to let her earrings be given to Jia for any reason.

She walked back around me and got up in the chair, this time a little more resolute. I told her that she could hold my hands and squeeze as tight as she wanted to. When the moment came that the earrings went through her ears ( and she felt the pain) she was back to crying again. But they did a great job of getting her ears pierced - they look really good.

I took her for some ice cream, and for a while, she was not too happy with me. But after about a half hour, we were in Claire's looking at other earrings, and she went to their full-length mirror and was smiling at herself, moving her head back and forth to admire her new look. And feeling very grown up about herself.