Well I am about to spill my dirty little secret which is that Symeon still used a pacifier to go to bed at night until about a month ago. Yes it is true and I am not a bit ashamed since he has always been a great sleeper and always went to sleep on his own. He had such a sweet routine and since birth he has needed a pacifier kind of like a drug and to be honest I needed him to be a good sleeper so messing with his routine was just not an option. But as his 3rd birthday approached I knew it needed to go and since we moved about 6 months ago I figured that was long enough of an adjustment period.
I started the prep work before his 3rd check up and figured I would address it with his doctor and let him also tell Symeon it was time to give it up. I had tried several months before we moved telling him that big boys didn't use pacifiers and he responded with some big boys do and I am one of them and then he promptly walked away. Well I didn't really have a response so I dropped the subject. So at his 3rd check up the doctor gave me the ohh not good look and told us both it needed to go because it is really bad for his teeth. I really wanted to say hey braces are a right of passage he'll be fine but I knew he was right.
Symeon is very concerned about making healthy choices for his body and we talk about that often in our home so when I explained that it could harm his teeth he seemed to embrace that so we went with it. First he gave it up at quiet time and the first day his lip curled out and he looked so sad I almost caved but we held strong. After about a week and a conversation with a good friend who had the same struggle I decided cold turkey was the best. So I prepped him with the information the doctor told him and told him that this night would be his last with a pacifier and that tomorrow we would get rid of them. He agreed much to my shock. I was a bit worried because I didn't know if it would be several nights of crying or what he would do.
The next morning he woke up I told him he could send them to our friend baby Simon in PA or he could throw them in the trash. He opted to throw them in the trash so he collected them threw them away and went about his day no problem and I thought is it really going to be this easy. Fast forward to bedtime and he is a bit sad mopping around not wanting to read books and then wanting to go to bed on the floor. With some reassurance and some loves he laid in his bed and asked me why the doctor said he had to get rid of his pacifier. I explained again and then breathed a sigh of relief because he blamed the doctor not me which was a relief this way I could offer some comfort since it was the doctor after all who took it away.
I guess for about 2 years Symeon has gone into a night time trance sucking on his pacifier and pulling the tail of his Cat in the Hat stuffed animal. I reassured him that not one was going to take Cat from him and he could still pull his tail and rub his face like he had every night for two years. He looked at me with such a sad face and said Mom I don't know how no one ever taught me how to pull Cat's tail. I was so shocked and he said Mom will you do I just can't. So rubbed his face with Cat's tail and felt a wave of sadness for him as I took two sacred things away from him in one swoop. After falling asleep with no crying except from me as I let go of some part of my first born baby, he slept through the night no problem and has slept fine every night since. He still sleeps with Cat but he does not pull his tail the way he did before and he does not rub his face with it either. The only little hiccup is that I found out that Symeon used his pacifier every morning around 5:30 to fall back to sleep and without it he was ready for his day very very early for about a week. He never talked about it after that first night after he asked if Marin, Shawn, Denise, Michael (our housemates) or I would be using a pacifier and I reassured him that no one in our house would be using a pacifier he seemed satisfied and a right of passage in letting go of a baby thing and moving into the toddler and kid world has been traversed.
I am pretty sure it was a bit harder on me than him and I thought oh gosh I have to get it together there are going to be so many of these types of transitions in his life. God help me!
Here he is having collected them all from around his bed and throwing them into the trash.
My friend said oh gosh he is just like his Mama once the decision had been made he was like okay I am done with that let's move on and I guess that is true. We both mull it over for a while but once we decide we decide and then we do what needs to be done and he did.
