Michigan is having a cool streak just for us! Mother Nature loves us, apparently. Its sooooo nice. I just want to wake up, rush outside and sit there all day enjoying the cool breeze. It is going to be realllly hard going back to the 105 degree days after this! And the grass is lush and green and soft so I just want to roll around in it like a child. Addy & Noah are having so much fun running barefoot in the grass without worrying about dog poop fire ants. Oh and about the squirrels? Of course we have squirrels in texas. but we don’t have midwestern huge-ass brown squirrels. In Texas our squirrels are TINY things and just totally different.

So let’s get down to business and stop the weather blahblah.

Today was the big day of local business I eluded to in an earlier post. Tina guessed it right in the comments….the business was that Addy got her ears pierced!!! She has been asking for a year now, consistently. We agreed we would do it for her 2nd birthday and I started really researching it and knew there was no way I was going to take her to someone who had zero training in piercing (ie Claire’s or even our doctor) and that I was also not willing to have her ears done with a piercing gun. I really only wanted it done with a certified professional piercer. Problem was, not one single piercer in our area in Texas would do the job. So her 2nd birthday came and went and I back-burnered the piercing since there were no options left that I was ok with.

Then when our trip to Michigan panned out, I contacted a friend of mine with the piercing hook-up and she was all “Let me take care of all the details. I’ll book the appointment, have them set aside the earrings in two sizes, I’ll bring suckers and distracting toys and my kids for moral support and inspiration, I’ll bring my camera and take pics and video. You just show up.” How could I say no? It is only because she had the hook-up with this local place that Addy was able to have it done. This place is also where both Tony, Thanh and I all got our first tattoos so its a place I definitely know and trust.

So we went. Addy was still consistently sure she wanted it done and understood the pain issue. And I knew it was basically now or never. It went really well. It hurt. It was fast. Her ears look totally awesome and I am so so SO glad I stuck with my guns and did the needle over the gun. Addy absolutely freakin’ LOVES her new earrings and is so so so proud of them. She thanked the piercer (which, he claims, is a first for the child crowd! haha) and in the car outside the piercing place she looked at her ears her rear mirror and said “I love my earrings, Dada!” as he buckled her in. She has randomly said a dozen or more times to anyone who will listen “Look at my earrings!” and she insists on looking at them in the mirror over and over and over. I seriously have no regrets which is a big deal because I was pretty sure I might! I never ever thought I’d pierce my child’s ears at the age of 2 and was very very nervous and anxious about it. But I am positive I did the right thing.

{this is her contemplative-but-goofy look - an Addy Classic}

There is more to the story, really. For the first year Addison was home we went back and forth on the issue of removing her ear tags (the pronounced nodules of skin on her tragus of both ears) surgically. We felt a lot of pressure by Vietnam culture and some people here in the states too to have them removed in order to make her “beautiful”. I am sorry to say I let some of that get to me for awhile. I’m so glad we had several months before we really had to seriously consider the issue (before her ENT considered the risks of anesthesia to be low enough to warrant both reconstructive surgeries she would require). Meanwhile over that year a few people spoke to me about experiences of friends and family - adults now - who grew up with ear tags and opted to keep them and not have them removed and that planted a seed for me. When we moved to texas, we sat down with our awesome doctor and asked her for her opinion and she presented us with a lot of very sound psychological reasons why she considered it to be EXTREMELY important that we NOT do the surgery until Addison was old enough to ask for it and consent. It sealed the deal for Tony and I and surgery was no longer a consideration. Instead of viewing her ear tags as an unfortunate birth defect we started to view them as a beautiful extension of herself. most people say they would never have noticed them if they didn’t know about them and we are so happy with our decision to keep them.

{addy and her girlie, J~, sharing the girlfriend love and support}

When she started asking for earrings, we had still not made a decision about the surgeries and I considered having the earrings done during surgery - kill two birds with one stone. But when we decided not to do the surgery I had to reconsider the options. Some people had suggested that we would not want to peirce her ears becuase it would draw attention to the tags, that we should in fact grow out her hair to cover her ears, not pull it into a pony tail, etc. But we had made the choice to embrace every inch of her as perfect  and the ear piercing seemed to be an awesome and symbolic way to celebrate her beauty and the beauty of her ears, just as they are. I’m so lucky that I have such a great friend who really set the piercing up for me and I am especially lucky that she just knew instinctively what it symbolized for me as well as how excited Addy was. Thank you Jackie!

Anyway, to be brief, afterward we went to lunch with our two families (our huge huge families - 11 of us total and that was when we didn’t have Dalton & Teegan yet!!) which was soooo fun. Man I love being around mamas that I just really relate to and connect with and who have such great kids!!! I’m so lucky!

Then we came home, had naps, my Mom grilled for all of us and also my brother and his girlfriend who I hadn’t seen since we moved to texas. It was great to see them all again. My brother is like a very very tall 35 year old who acts like he’s perpetually 8 and my kids adore him like no other. so they were so happy to wrestle and chase and act crazy. Addy didn’t really know him and now adores him, too. He spent quite a bit of time teaching her how to punch like a man. Makes a mama proud! ha.

So that was today! Long but wonderful day. I have to say, so far? This vacation has NOT disappointed at all.