Bye Bye Binky

Well we finally made the leap to say bye bye to the binky. I borrowed an idea from Meredith because I thought it was really cute. We spent this weekend at Disneyland. There is a Build A Bear on the Disney Walk. So at the end of the trip we made one last stop. We took Andrew to Build a Bear. We had been talking about how he was too big for a binky and that we were going to make a binky bear and put his binky in the bears tummy. He had seemed excited about it and would even tell people he what he was going to do. Well we knew that even though he was willing to do it didn't mean it was going to be easy once the binky was gone. Here is a photo walk of the experience.
In the car enjoy the end of the binky.

Andrew is stepping on the pedal to stuff his bear.

Putting the binky in his bears tummy.

Hugging his new bear.

Carrying the bear back to the car. He really liked that box.

Looks great doesn't it. So smooth and a happy toddler. Ha Ha Ha. We wish. The first breakdown happened while we were in line paying for this bear. But we got him calmed down and headed out. It is 1 1/2 hours to drive back to our house from Disneyland. He cried, screamed, threw a fit, and was thrashing around in his car seat for about 50 minutes of that before he finally wore himself out and went to sleep. It was awful. I even cried with him some and of course questioned if what we were doing was the right thing and if I was being a terrible mother.

He slept the rest of the way home and transferred inside to finish his nap. When he woke up the "fun" began again. Big time fit. We finally got him calmed down and distracted doing something else. He did well the rest of the day. Then bed time. It was a rough night. He cried for his binky for a long time before finally going to sleep. Then he woke up 2 different times just bawling for his binky and was really hard to console. He went to day care yesterday and other than being tired did great. Let me follow up by saying he never uses a binky at day care, not even for naps. He was really only using at home to sleep. That is why the nights are the worst.

Well last night (night 2) was a little better. He only woke up once crying for his binky. Luckily he has not tried to rip open the bear. He has asked us to get the binky out but we keep saying we can't it all gone. So things are getting better. Hopefully they will keep going in the right direction. This was something we had to do before I head back to work. We know he is capable of being binky free but it is also his only security object. Why does parenthood have to be so difficult?