Soothers

Sam slept with a soother for a long time. A long time. Not there's necessarily anything wrong with that -- unless, say, he would, I don't know, wake up and wake ME up because he'd lost it. Or, even better, because he'd lost the extra one that he liked to have in his hand. Oy.

Julie and I decided that 3 years old was old enough to lose the soother. We talked about it for a long time beforehand, trying to figure out how to take them away without causing a serious meltdown. We'd planned on sabotaging them (cutting holes in them) until they were no longer comfortable to have in, and we started telling Sam that soothers stopped working when you turned 3.

In the days leading up to his birthday, there was some trepidation. Ok, replace "some" with "mountains" and "trepidation" with "abject terror".

We'd told Brad about the plan, such as it was. When I picked up Sam from daycare on his birthday, Brad tells me that Sam napped -- for 2 1/2 hours, no less -- with no soother (and virtually no complaint). "It was the Three-Year-Old Fairy," Brad tells me. "Good enough!", says I.

As soon as we got home, I raced upstairs and stole the soothers out of Sam's room. Now we had a story; now we were ready.

That night, when Sam asked for his soothers, I told him that they were gone. The Three-Year-Old Fairy had taken them; he was a big boy now, and didn't need them. Sam slept.

Now, it wasn't quite that easy; he did ask for them a lot for the first couple of days, but we held the line and eventually stopped even answering him when he asked for them. We fleshed out our story, and it turned out that the Three-Year-Old Fairy took them to give to another little kid that didn't have any. (For two days, the big complaint wasn't that they were gone - it was that the fairy hadn't said please. There were emails to and from the fairy about that one.)

But he continued to go without, and he now sleeps better than he has in months. Life is better.