I Did It My Way…..
Our girls are proud, card carrying members of the soother brigade. While Grace is now retired from the soother world, she was active in the community until five years of age. We are now gently nudging Edie towards retirement as well. At 3 ½, we figure it is time for her to give it up. We weren’t so worried about Grace, as she had knocked out her front teeth by the age of three, but Edie has all her teeth still and we don’t want them affected.
The soother is only used at night, when she is falling asleep. In the past, when Edie succumbed to sleep, I gently popped the soother out, and it dangled from her p.j.’s on one of those clips in case she needed to find it at night (with the hope that she wouldn’t holler for me to help her find it).
We have been talking to Edie a lot lately about giving it up, and she wants no help from us (I have suggested making offerings to fairies, mailing it to a new baby who might need one and even offered a….wait for it….puffy stickers! in exchange for the damn thing). However, without our help, I have been witnessing Edie putting herself through the most gradual of withdrawal programs, and she is having plenty of success with it.
In the morning, the soother is hidden under the pillow for the day (before, I had to remove it altogether so she wouldn’t sneak out for a pre-sleep nip). She pats the pillow and says goodbye to it for the day. There are periodic checks during the day, to make sure “Mommy hasn’t taken it away”, but no sucking. At night, she refuses the clip, insisting on “free sucking”, where the risk of losing the soother is the greatest. However, the latest step in the withdrawal program would appear to be removing the soother right before falling asleep and tucking it under her pillow ‘til morning. She is going through the night without her trusty soother. I am so impressed with this self-imposed program of hers. Grace ended up having to do the chicken and go cold turkey when she gave it up. Edie’s method is a kinder, gentler way of doing things.
I can just picture her being the most popular drug counsellor of her day, with stints on Oprah explaining her method:
1) Don’t let Mommy hide it
2) Hide it under your piwwow
3) Just use a little bit of it when you weally weally HAVE to
4) Soon you will be a BIG BIG BIG girl/boy and…no more dwugs!
(p.s. – please don’t tell me that she is too old to be using a soother, I am too old to be laughing at fart jokes and I still do, it’s just how we roll)
5 comments:
Signy gave up the habit at 2 years 11 months. It was called her Yodough.
Yay Edie! Good for her. Soother is better than thumb. It's kinda hard to hide that under the pillow.
I’m a big fan of child-led child rearing. Letting the kids set the pace for stuff like giving up soothers, their thumb, the bottle, breastfeeding, diapers, etc., always makes these things more successful in my opinion. My mother was on me constantly when my daughter wasn’t toilet trained by one, claiming that all her kids were by that age. I let it go until one day my daughter (at about 2 ½) just decided she wanted to try wearing big girl panties. She had 2 minor accidents the first week, but then never looked back.
hey man Speedy had hers until she was like 4. and i had even cut the tip so sucking it was useless.
just a little nub she held tightly with her teeth. it was a hoot.
and she refused puffy stickers? tough to break that one.
I still thinking saying "Fuck" all the time makes me sound cool.
That's how I roll too.
Post a Comment