For years now I've been saying that Brianna would need to wait until she was 12 years old to get her ears pierced. My reasons for this mainly revolved around the values I would like to teach Brianna about being a smart, independent woman who isn't valued primarily for her looks. This seemed like a pretty good line of thought to me and pretty reasonable, but over time I've come to recognize that like most things in our culture, what makes reasonable and logical sense to me just isn't how most people do things. Of course, Brianna has been pleading to get the deed done for years now, and Jen has occasionally expressed her agreement that we should just go ahead with it. Recently I was at Brianna's school and realized that literally every girl in her class had her ears pierced except for her.
So I finally gave in. We took her down to Jori Zan's in Salem, which I would highly recommend (based on the reviews I'm not the only one).
I will say that one advantage of waiting until Brianna was older to have her ears pierced is that she is absolutely meticulous about making sure that they are taken care of just the way that Jori told her to. She does the special soap, the soaking in salt water, all that without a lot of reminder from us. As a result they've healed nicely and Brianna's looking forward to being able to wear different earrings soon - but no danglies... dad has to keep some rules going.
