Bye Bye Binks

WARNING: The following story is really long, but it is written out for my benefit!

Taeya is finally done with her Binki. I thought the day would never really come. We had some really rough weeks but I think we are finally completely over it! The night before I went to Vegas with my sisters we were at a little family party at Gordon's sisters house, Cheryl. Cheryl has a little girl, Laeklan, who is just 4 weeks younger than Taeya. At the party Taeya would just randomly walk up to little Laeklan and claw at her face. It finally got to the point were Laeklan would get scared when Taeya would even look at her. Gordon took her in the other room and told her if she did it one more time, he would take away her binki. Well, a few minutes later she did it again. After she scratched her I told Taeya to go and tell Gordon what she did, and she told him (in her own crazy words) that she had scratched Laeklan, and she even knew that she would get her binki taken away, so we took it away. I thought we were just going to be done with it for the rest of the evening, but Gordon thought it was a good chance to get rid of it. Taeya had been such a great sleeper with the binki that I didn't know if we should mess that up, but I knew I was leaving for the weekend, so I figured he would get the worst of it. We figured we would just try it and see what happened.

When we got home from the party Gordon helped Taeya gather all of the binki's up, they put them in a bag, and Taeya dropped then into the big garbage outside. Surpringly she went to bed just fine that night, and slept through the night. I was shocked! Friday during the day she asked for it quite a few times but I would just remind her that she threw it in the garbage and I would try to get her mind off of it. Friday night I was in Vegas and Gordon ended up taking her for a drive in the car to get her to go to sleep. She did okay for the rest of the weekend, and pretty much the rest of the next week, so I thought we were in the clearing!

The next week (so about a week later), she was aweful. We could not get her to go to sleep. She figured out how to climb (a.k.a. fall) out of bed and she was even able to open the door a few of the times! After she got out of her crib a few times I thought we would just play around for a little bit to get her more tired and then try again. Gordon had been working out in the basement, and Taeya went to find him. She thought she needed to lift a few weights. (I was hoping it would tire her out!)

After the weight-lifting I thought we would try bedtime again. She climbed out again, we took her for a drive, she woke up and started crying when I put her back in bed, I tried putting her in bed with us, she just crawled out and wanted to play. Finally around 12:30 am, I layed on the couch with her and she fell asleep!

That whole week she was so hard to get to go to sleep. We would let her cry for about 45 mintues before we would go in her room, and then usually I would lay with her on the couch and she would go to sleep. We finally made her totally cry it out, it took 2 1/2 hours!! We were dying. She had to do that for a few nights.

Now she is doing fine. Her naps are only around and hour long instead of two, but I guess I am going to have to live with that. She is so much cuter without a binki in her mouth! She is still obsessed with anyones binki, but she knows it is not hers. She even found a few random ones around the house and we had to be sneaky to get them away from her. We had a rough month but I am sure glad that we are finally done with the binki!