Goodbye, Oh beloved paci (Ryan edition)

Well, yesterday was the day. The day I dreaded since I brought him home from the hospital passionately sucking on his little MAM. We had decent success with taking Anna-Kate's paci away (and here), so thought we'd go for the same strategy with Ryan. I gathered them all into a ziploc bag for him to throw away. However, at 16.5 months Anna-Kate didn't realize the finality of throwing them away, so happily complied. At 6 days shy of 20 months, Ryan was having none of it (our ped suggests taking the paci during the "teen months" so they are old enough not to *need* it and emotionally handle the loss, but young enough to forget about it relatively quickly and move on. We barely made it time-wise...) See, he wouldn't let go, and was trying to open the bag up to release his dear friend from captivity...



Hugging goodbye...



Anna-Kate came over to give him a hug and kiss then looked up at Chris and said, "cheeeese!". Awesome, her "cheesing", Ryan beside himself and me trying not to bust out laughing. Poor guy.



Last night was night 1 of no pacifier for Ryan. He did pretty well. I rocked him a bit longer as I sang an extra couple of songs to him. I laid him down and left. About 1 minute later he started crying, and he was MAD. If you are a mom, you know what that cry is like, quite different from the cry of sad, upset, scared etc. So, I didn't feel too bad for him. But, about 10 minutes in it turned sad and just downright pitiful. "Mama" he cried sooooo sadly. I started to cry. Chris told me to be strong so I let him cry about 5 more minutes then I went in to comfort him. I held him until he stopped crying and told him how much I loved and what a big boy he was then I prayed for him for extra peace and comfort from the Lord, layed him down (awake) and left. I didn't hear a peep out of him until I got him this morning. Thank you Jesus!

(PS, to seal the deal that I am mean, I borrowed my friends' "nail polish" (called mavala I think?) that is used (it was given to her by her daughter's dentist) to prevent nail biting and thumb sucking and put it on his pointer and middle fingers, aka, the back-up paci, before bed. I didn't want to jump out of the fire into the frying pan, or however that saying goes...). As an aside to that, as I was vegging and catching up on my TIVO from last week I got a serious craving for Doritos. I subsequently finished the bag of chips. As I was digging my finger into the bottom of the bag to get the remaining chips and licking my finger a bit of the mavala stuff got in my mouth. OMg, it was so bitter and horrible. It ruined my chips, and I felt so bad I didn't reapply it to Ryan tonight. But, back to the story.

So we felt encouraged today and had a good morning then put him down right at 1. He cried and I went in about 10-15 minutes later to comfort, same as last night, asleep like that. However, instead of sleeping until 4, he woke up at 3. Yuck.

He was so tired this evening, and as Anna-Kate didn't nap today either (and why would she??) we decided to have a movie night. We all huddled in blankets on the couch with warm chocolate chip cookies and watched "Beauty and the Beast" with remote handy for fast-forwarding through all those pesky "scary" scenes. (My girl is definately sensitive and I plan to keep it that way as long as possible.)

We put them both down a little early. Ryan cried about 10-15 minutes and I was about to go in until it suddenly stopped. I'll peek in later, to make sure he's asleep. Praying he didnt' find his fingers. With Anna-Kate, she was good on the 3rd day, so hopefully tomorrow Ryan will be out of the worst of it as well.