Bye-Bye Paci

So, it's pretty much over, the mega addiction to the paci.
Maddie was a breastfed baby up until around 17 months old where I then decided it was time to ween. Maddie didn't seem to fight it at the time, but she seemed to greatly miss the skin-to-skin contact and therefore adopted the I'll-lay-on-my-momma's-belly-with-my-face moment. She does this when she gets sleepy or when she just wants to cuddle. And it's not just laying on my belly that she likes, it's laying on my bare belly that she feels she needs. I'm pretty much ok with it at home, but no floppin' up my shirt while out in public. :) Sorry, baby girl, you're just too big for that!
Anyway, while she laid on my belly, she also wanted that sucking motion and would yell out for her paci. It only seemed to be around me that she was so hard-core addicted to that thing. At first I was like, "only at night time," but that didn't seem to work out well since Daddy and I disagreed {passively} on the idea and he'd give it to her whenever she asked. So no consistency = crazy kid.
There was another time that the paci was actually lost one weekend and so I thought it'd be a great moment to end it all. We spent the next day comforting our traumatized child who would go off into sobs because she didn't have it. It was heart breaking. No, more than that. It was torture {for her, not us}. So, of course I replaced it.
A couple more months went by and I decided to do the "chop". It's where you take small snips off the paci, never taking it away, but allowing the child to decide not to take it. I've heard from some parents that their kid would take a paci with only a stub on it, where others have said their kid dropped it the first time it was snipped. 
The first snip didn't seem to make a difference to Maddie, she simply looked at it and popped it back into her mouth. A week went by. I snipped again. She glared a bit more, and it took a great deal more control to actually hold it in her mouth, but still, she took it with ease. By the third week and snip, it's pretty much become a headless horseman, and she only thinks about it in it's previous form. She may ask for it, and I gladly hand it over, but she doesn't actually put it in her mouth anymore, and when she's really upset at me {after asking for it} she throws it across the room, which is a whole new post in itself: Picking Your Battles With A Toddler. 
Overall, she's done really well. I figure by the end of this month, with her 2nd birthday, I'll have simply filed them away and they'll be a thing of the past. No screams, no fits, no withholding precious artifacts that my child would give her life for, just simply snipping and putting away. And in my book, life is a little better when moments are done by choice rather than through tears.



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