Bye Bye Binkie

After my mom left the boys and I all took a few days to mourn. For Ian, this manifested itself in his unwillingness to nap. He would cry for an entire two hours at each nap time and not sleep at all. This from a kid who has happily laid down for his regularly scheduled naptimes every day for the last 2 years. It was bizarre. And so frustrating.

And during his two hours of crying he would soak his shirt with tears, and chew on his binkie. And on day two of this, he chewed the tip right off. When I went to get him up, he explained to me that "Ian sad because" his binkie had "Bonked" and had "Broken. Down."

For the last year Ian has insisted on one particular binkie, and accepted no substitutes. Even the right brand and nipple type in new patterns and colors made the binkie invalid. And since MAM apparently discontinued The Binkie we were left with no other option. 'Try the Internet,' you say. 'The Internet has everything.' Alas, even the Internet failed us this time. And fearing that the day would come that we would be without any more binkies, I have for months stopped the mother of every child I have seen with this binkie, and after following every lead, I have come up empty handed.

And so when I saw that The Last Binkie on Earth had a hole in it, I know we were in for some wailing and gnashing of teeth. Since Ian had bit the hole himself, he didn't question it or show any resentment -- he just accepted that his binkie no longer did what it used to do. Seeing this, I decided to allow Ian to decide if he wanted to keep it around or not. So that night I clipped his "broken down" binkie to his shirt as always, and watched as Ian pitifully held the binkie to his mouth as he tried to fall asleep.

We've taken the "broken down" binkie to the zoo, the doctors office, to playgroup, each time with it clipped to his shirt as usual, but lacking all the usual comfort it once provided. He still asks for it at nap time.

Don't get the impression that this was an easy transition -- Ian continued to cry for two hours during each naptime and for more than an hour at bedtime. And he would wake several times a night crying when he couldn't reinsert his binkie and fall back to sleep. He simply couldn't do it without the binkie. If I could have gotten a hold of a new binkie I would have thankfully abandoned our Bye Bye Binkie plan. We even took a trip to the store in hopes of persuading Ian to accept one of the new binkies MAM created. No go.

And the worst part of it all was that Joseph began sleeping through the night the EXACT day that Ian stopped. I cannot describe my dissapointment and desperation at this occurance. Now while Joseph slept peacefully, I listened to Ian scream and pulled my hair out.

On day 8 Ian finally fell asleep at naptime. After silently rejoicing, I spend my few moments of calm and quietude cleaning up around the house. And during this effort I emptied a diaper bag and found The True Last Binkie on Earth -- we had one more the whole time. Had this binkie turned up a day sooner, there would be no post about all of this -- I would have certainly given him the binkie and postponed this fight for another day. But since he was then taking his very first nap, I place the binkie on a high shelf and knew that Ian's days with a binkie were officially over.