Bye Bye MiMI, MiMi Bye Bye

When Dietrich was born I had decided that I would try to avoid giving him a pacifier, because I had read that they can interfere with nursing.  But by day three my mom said just give him one, and oh the freedom!  No longer was he nursing every 30 seconds for 45 minutes at time!  And since he nursed until he was almost 18 months I can safely assume it did not interfere with his nursing.  We called it his Binky.

I thought his first word was "mama" and it sounded like "mimi" and then I realized that he was saying binky, not mama.  Henceforth we called that plug in his face a MiMi.

 When Lenorah was born he was two and he still had a MiMi, and I knew he was getting too old, but he didn't sleep well and then I had a new baby and so we made it a bed/naptime only thing.  We watched an Elmo video where they sang "bye, bye binky, binky bye bye" and I switched it to MiMi and I would sing it to him whenever he wanted it during the day and the transition to sleeping time only was easy.  And now he is just shy of 3 1/2 years old and you can go ahead and judge me for letting him still have a MiMi because I judge me and have totally caught myself judging other little kids who still have one and are younger than Dietrich, which I rationalize by saying you don't see his in public, womp womp.  I'm a bad person :(  We all have our things, things that we allow our children to do, continue to do, secretly do (heck, some of us have things we do ourselves that we would never want anyone to know about!) bottles, blankies, binkys, thumbs, sometimes they just love them so much and it is so hard to break their tiny little hearts and say "hey, I gave you this, you fell in love, and now I'm taking it away."  So last week we started the countdown, which might have been just as much for my benefit as his, 7 days with MiMi, 6, 2, 1 more night with MiMi...  

Yesterday was the day, I picked him up from preschool and we headed to the store.  We went straight to the toy section and I let him pick out whatever toy he wanted.  He fell in love with a Thomas the train and track, and I threw in some train cars because trains are more fun with cars and he is about to give up his best friend!

Then he handed this bag with his last two MiMi's to the cashier and he did it like it was no big deal, here is my best friend I have Thomas now.  The cashier was awesome, asking him "are you a big boy now?" "Yes I have Thomas the Train!"

 He was totally fine and we walked out of the store and I wanted to burst into tears!  Partly because yes giving them up for a toy is not that hard but how is he really going to feel about it at bedtime, and also I just made him give away his best friend, and I somehow let my three year old still have a binky, and also he is not a baby anymore, blubber blubber in the parking lot.

He did great, he loves the train, he asked me twice where his MiMi was but he wasn't even upset when I reminded him he used them to get his new Thomas toy.  At bedtime he was a little sad, but mostly because he was tired, and he laid down with Thomas and he fell asleep without his MiMi.  It wasn't a great night of sleep, he woke up four times crying, but he never once asked for his MiMi and this morning he woke up and said he slept all night without it!  Yay you! So we did it, and it will be a few days I'm sure before he is sleeping easily through the night again, but that is okay, it is his best friend that he is missing after all.