My friend Sage who is a PA in a family practice told me she recommends to her patients to give up the pacifier at one-year of age, so we knew once Eloise turned one that she didn’t have much more time with hers. By that point, she LOVED her binky. Four months earlier she could have cared less but something about nine months of age made both of our children crave a piece of rubber in their mouth.
Our intent was to wean Eloise of her pacifier before her 18-month well child check-up but a ton of stuff was going on and we didn’t get around to it (I know, typical parenting excuse.) Finally over the Christmas break we made a weaning plan based on a recommendation I had heard somewhere to cut the top off the pacifier so it is no longer as appealing. I begrudgingly cut off the top of two of her beloved Soothie’s.
Andy and I watched the expression on Eloise’s face change from pleasure to confusion as she put the binky in her mouth and immediately noticed the modified experience. She tried to suck on it but it was not exactly suckable in its new state so she bit down on it holding onto it for dear life with her front teeth.
Things were going okay with this approach until Eloise became really upset about something, and being an occasional softie, I ended up giving her an unmodified binky. She suddenly knew there was something seriously wrong with the pacifiers with the tip cut off and no longer wanted anything to do with them. Her joy over having her real binky back in her mouth caused us to realize that it had been a bad idea to give her a legit Soothie and that we needed to wean her completely ASAP.
So on a day in late December, we removed the binky from our lives cold turkey. We gave her the option of a cut tip binky and she looked at us like it was complete b*llsh!t and then hucked it across the room. I took that as my cue to throw all of the cut binkies away and give up pacifiers all together. I had one good one stored in the far back of the cupboard for an absolute emergency but we never used it.
She was not happy but within 24 hours, heck maybe even 12 she was over it. Belén had weaned in a similar manner except she was a little older so we could negotiate with her better and make her feel like she had some part of the decision making process.
I bring this up now because we are weaning Eloise away from her favorite sippy cups. Eloise is particular about things and she has a very few things that are her absolute, I may die if I cannot have them right now, favorites. I’ve written extensively about her monkey jammies, which she is close to wearing holes in, but the other important item in her life is her Nuk Hello Kitty sippy cup. It is a really great cup (and comes with other characters on front) and we have used only them for the past year.
In short, I highly recommend them for a one-year-old but I think they seem pretty similar to a bottle so she is on a program to cut out the Nuk’s cold turkey and replace them with Belén’s (and our) favorite Nalgene bottles.
These suckers are workhorses and have a no spill plastic insert that you can order more of. They are super easy to clean and do not get the gross moldy stuff in them like almost every other sippy cup we’ve ever used (and we’ve tried a lot of them.) And no, I am not being paid by any of these companies to endorse their products.
So far, she is not a big fan. We convinced her to try her new purple Nalgene that we had made a really big deal about by putting some juice in it. Up until now we have not given our kids much juice due to the high sugar content. Day two in Mexico, Miss Eloise was visibly, uncomfortably constipated probably because she was totally ready to potty train before being thrust into an new world with no potty seats (I should have packed one!) The result was a gravitation towards milk, for comfort, and holding it all in. We felt horrible as we watched her try and work it out on a beach chair occasionally bursting into tears from the pain. We quickly introduced juice into her diet to help with the constipation and now both kids love it. Great…
I digress. Nothing like a complete tangent on constipation.
Anyway, so despite a totally bare, post-vacation refrigerator, we happened to have some unopened cranberry juice left over from one of my going away parties. We put the cranberry juice in the purple Nalgene bottle and suddenly she was motivated to drink from it. For three days, she refused to consume milk from the new bottle but we gave it time and she caved. We knew she can only live without her beloved milk for a limited amount of time.
Our intention was not to be cruel, but by now we are pretty convinced, cold turkey is the only way to wean those things our little ones love that are no longer good for them…otherwise, old habits will linger on for a very long time…
How did you wean your child from the binky and sippy cup?
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