Denny joined Miles and me for Book Babies at the library on Friday.  It was lots of fun.  We sang songs and listened to the leader read books and danced.  There were some super-cute kids there.  One thing caught my attention, though.  There was one really adorable little girl who I think would have been more adorable if she didn’t have pierced ears.

Piercing an infant’s ears is such a bizarre thing to do.  For one thing, it hurts.  I remember getting mine done at the mall when I was 9 or 10, at a place called Jewelry Hut (I swear).  After I got the first ear done, I wasn’t so sure I wanted the second one.  And I remember the aftermath being a giant pain.  My earring holes got all crusty and painful and gross, and my mom had to swab them with alcohol every night.  I hear that if you get it done by an actual piercing specialist with a needle, it’s not as traumatic to the tissues as with an earring gun, but it was guns all around at Jewelry Hut.

I was a pretty responsible kid, even.  I don’t know how you would keep a baby from grabbing at her earrings and getting them all infected, or how the parent would effectively keep them clean.  It’s all I can do to keep Miles’s fingernails under an inch long, he’s so wiggly; it must be a hundred times worse when the kid is wiggling away because the process is actually painful.

It just creeps me out to perform a painful cosmetic procedure on a baby for no reason other the parents’ entertainment.  It’s different when the kid is old enough to grasp the concept and request it—I’m not casting any aspersions on people in that situation, and it was fun having pierced ears in the 80’s when I got to amass a giant earring collection (both giant in terms of numbers and in item size; after all, the earrings had to be proportionate to the bangs).  I don’t know if it’s a gender identity thing or what.  Are parents so worried that people will think their little girl is a little boy that they have to stab through her flesh to prove her femininity to strangers?  People think Miles is a girl all the time.  Just today he was wearing a blue shirt with brown trim and a lion on it, and a person in a restaurant called him she.  It doesn’t really concern me.

I shouldn’t be too critical, though.  I did, in fact, order a Halloween costume for Miles that he will probably not like wearing.  But I don’t think it will cause him any physical tissue damage, unless he looks so cute that I actually munch him.

Pictures forthcoming, of course, so that he may be exploited by all of you as well.