As 2014 was drawing to a close, my husband and I reflected on our comfortable, cozy life with Molly and Abigial. Routine, routine, routine was our mantra and the girls were thriving, but CHANGE was upon us. Not the simple change, where you decide to wear a different shirt. But the life-altering kind of change where you know the end product is going to be worth it, but you're uncertain of the journey. Now that the girls were two we realized we had four major transitions to survive. Eliminating the bottle, the soother, the diaper and the crib. I've listed them in the order we thought was going to best to attack them.
We chose the bottle as the first transition for a few reasons; the soother seemed like a battle I didn't feel like waging over the Christmas holidays and potty training or playing the "get back in bed game" didn't seem all that fun either. So the bottle was our first plan of attack. (It helped that we were both tired of cleaning them, LOL.) It was also becoming increasingly obvious that the girls didn't need or sometimes even want milk before bed anymore. We set the date, Saturday, December 20th, our first day of Christmas vacation and my god-daughter's birthday!
Of course, that's when the girls thought it would be best to throw us a curve ball. After a great birthday party with lots of fun entertainment for the girls we arrived home to make two glaring discoveries that put a halt to our plan. Our first discovery, the girls were having so much fun playing at the party, they barely did any eating at the party! When we started getting the girls for bed they started asking for their bottles. We were just discussing the option of retracting our plan and giving them a bottle anyway when Shawn discovered one of the soothers had been chewed almost
completely through. Since we were down to two soothers and if they've started chewing them, they're just going to continue, I decided at that moment that it was time for "no more soothers".
Talk about a plan diversion! No warning for us or for the girls...(maybe band-aids are better ripped off quickly!) we just gave the girls their bottle and then calmly explained that their soothers, or sue-sues as they affectionately referred to them, were broken and we had to throw them out. For the first few minutes the girls were very logical, thing that were broken needed to be thrown out, makes sense. But then the cute pleas from Molly came, "Daddy, fix it. Fix my sue-sue!" I'm not exactly sure how Shawn managed not to cave or run out to Shoppers and buy a replacement but we held our ground. Thankfully the girls only used their soothers for naps and bedtime so we only had two tricky times to overcome. Each time a nap or bedtime approached we would calmly explain that their soothers were broken and they were big girls now. The first three days were the hardest as the girls would complain a bit in bed before falling asleep. Then there was the sharing of their feelings where everyone from Grandma to the cashier at Zehrs had to hear the story about how the sue-sues were broken, Daddy couldn't fix it and they were big girls now.
It took about a week for the girls to stop talking about it on a daily basis. We thought it was going to be a painful journey but now that I'm not searching endlessly under a crib with a flashlight and a mini hockey stick for a soother at two in the morning, it was worth the transition!!
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