Cold Turkey?

At Charlie's last well baby visit, our pediatrician encouraged us to get rid of the awesome, comforting pacis Charlie refers to as "nay nays." When I asked if this could be a gradual process, he said he thought doing it "cold turkey" was best. Soooo, because we think highly of our doctor and have liked his advice on other things, we gave it a whirl. Well, I wanted to go back on it from time to time, but Jimmy was good at keeping us on track.

What we found out is that Charlie could go to sleep fine without it (unless he was overly tired), but he woke up from his naps having a complete meltdown for the nay nay. Therefore, after several days of virtually no nay nay, Charlie got said nay nay back indefinitely for naps and bedtime only. Things are much better when he wakes up now, and he is pretty much okay with leaving the paci in the crib afterwards.

On the subject of giving up things, I tried to wean Charlie off his morning nap before Henry was born. I don't know that I thought he was particularly ready, I guess I just thought I should be doing that. After Henry was born I continued to experiment with no nap and finally just decided that if Charlie would still lay down and go to sleep for a bit in the morning, we would just keep doing that. This morning however, Jimmy found him happily awake when he should have been asleep, swinging a picture back and forth on the wall! He had lots of energy the whole morning and stayed awake until 1:00! I guess he is now really ready to move toward one nap!

The gist of what I feel like I'm learning is the importance of a child's readiness when encouraging him or her toward certain milestones and having a flexible frame of mind about it. It seems like most of it works itself out anyhow. I've also been thinking a lot about how every child is different, how every set of parents is unique, and that there are a lot of great ways to accomplish the same goals in parenting.