Comments on: Bye bye Binky

By: Émilie

Émilie — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:19:44 +0000

I got lucky on this one; it came out naturally. I was like your wife, Moksha, not wanting to start a war over it. I was not about to tear away my little boy’s nighttime comfort and leave him shivering in the cold misery of an empty bed.

He has started to be more difficult to put to bed at nap time, however, and he sometimes has trouble going back to sleep. He doesn’t ask for his soother specifically, though, so I’m not reintroducing it. Plus, I think it’s a mixture of this and the fact that, as he’s getting older, he still needs a pm nap, but he’s not tired as early in the afternoon. Today he made a fuss until 3pm because he wanted to nap in OUR bed.

We have had the binky bed restriction for a long while, too. Not just for the pacifier: the stuffed dog and blankie he sleeps with has to stay in the bed. We put up the rule for textile hygiene reasons (he used to munch on the dog’s ear).

Simon, I saw a girl about that age a while back at the mall, with a thumb stuck in her mouth. I guess the plastic version is easier to loose. And from watching Orly go, I believe you for the quicker second-born; she’s already sort of starting to help when dressing herself – pulling collar over her head, slipping arms into shirt.

Ah, the “put him down, he gets back up” cycle… Frank and I used to take turns being “on watch”; we had a contest as to who put Xavier back in bed the most times. I think one of us hit 52 times one evening.
A couple more months and we’ll be back at it with Orléane. Should be doubly fun since the kids share a room, and Xavier will certainly want to join the game.
I’ll keep your trick in mind.

Potty training, well… Xavier isn’t ready, that’s for sure. He does everything right and likes to pretend, but nothing comes out. And I guess we ourselves don’t have enough devotion for it right now. It’s a little tough spending 5-10 minutes in the bathroom with Xavier regularly while the one-year-old is roaming the house out there, or interrupting us. And he still prefers to be considered a baby like his sister, than doing like us – a sort of jealousy, that.
I think I’ll cut some slack on this for a while yet. His learning curve will probably be similar to Ben’s, which is fine.

By: Moksha

Moksha — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:59:59 +0000

Norah still gets her bink at night, but only at night. I have long been against this, askign my wife if we could start the war against the bink. She declined. However, I will say that I was very glad of this a few months ago when we moved Norah to a “big girl bed.” We put her down, she got up. We put her down, she got up. Then my wife had one fo the greatest brainstorms yet. She explained to Norah that the bink was only for in bed. It was the same rule we’d always had, but we’d never had to enforce it. We watched on the monitor and when she got out of bed we just went in and removed the bink. If she got back in bed, she got it back. It took exactly three repetitions of this cycle and she never got out again.

Now, however, I’m ready to get rid of the bink again
And congrat, Xavier!!

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:24:54 +0000

Dear god the second one is soooo much easier. Tavish trained himself pretty much by the time he was 2. Having that older sibling to look up to makes SUCH a big difference. (Talking potty here, not the binky.) Both our boys were pretty good about giving those up early. Our neighbour girl just turned 5 this month and I think she gave hers up just this winter. A little too long in my estimation, but who am I to judge, right?

By: vinny

vinny — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:53:30 +0000

Good luck! We waited until about Ben’s 3rd birthday before really getting serious about it but getting him used to the steps of it is a good foundation. Sara already likes to sit on the toilet (fully clothed) and “make pipi”.