Bye Bye Binky Bye Bye

I know quite surely that I’ve been pretty emotional lately due to this pregnancy.  I can cry at a silly commercial because I can put my family in the situation, I bawl my eyes out at sad stories, I let my mind wander that all sorts of things can happen right now and it tears me up.  But there is something about the realization that my baby girl is growing up that just really pulls at my heart strings.  She is done taking a binky and it was almost too easy for her to give it up.  Never again, for the rest of her life, will I see her silly little grin with those baby teeth gripping the end of a binky – her giggling the entire time.  Knowing that I will never get to see and hear that in person again makes me tear up as I type this blog entry.  She’s just getting so big on her own, and I hate that we chose to force more “growing up” on her when she wasn’t necessarily ready.  We knew that we didn’t want her to have a binky anymore by the time the new baby comes, and I always had 18 months in my head.  But in recent weeks, she’s taken her “binky loving” to the next level.  Carrying all 4 binkies around just for fun – wanting all of them in her crib at night just to hold, etc.  It was all harmless, but we knew it could only get worse.  So we decided on a whim that we would end her binky days before I went back to school, and before she moves to her next classroom at daycare – sort of a fresh start.  The first night, we thought we would send her to bed with only 1 binky.  She woke up around 1:30 am crying because she couldn’t find it, and we decided that from then on, we would just stop it cold turkey instead of torturing her with a lost binky at night.  The next day, I sent her to daycare and told them not to let her have it at nap time.  She cried for a long time for her binky, but finally took a nap.  That night, I rocked her to sleep and she whined for it for about 15 minutes, but eventually fell asleep and slept through the night without it.  And today, she has asked for it a couple times, but didn’t cry for it at nap or bed time.  Can it really be that easy?  Do babies really grow up that quickly?  If all of this is true, then I’ve learned that I don’t enjoy pushing my babies to grow up quickly.  It hurts my heart, and I hate knowing I’ll never have a specific memory with them again.  Like I said, maybe this is the pregnancy hormones talking, but I learn a new reason every day why being a parent is so difficult.  It’s the hardest, most amazing, most confusing, precious gift on this earth.  No more growing up so fast Miss Ayla Blair!

My tiny baby so cozy in her crib with her binky - the last picture of her that I have of her with her binky