Bottle-less

I've been reticent to post this for a few days, fearing it would lead to a reversal of fortune somehow. But it appears we are finally a bottle-free household! Woot! After 4 long years...DONE!  Yes, the magic bottles that soothed both of my girls to bed many an evening are no more. Playtex VentAire Wide bottle I continue to sing your praises, but I will never miss scrubbing your multiple pieces and worrying if you are going to leak...again. We missed the boat when Elisa was a toddler and let her continue to drink milk from these. The ped said not to push it until 18 months which then turned into 24 months and by nearly 3, I was going slightly mad.  She rejected every kind of sippy cup with milk time after time, and it made me crazy to have to keep pouring it back in the bottle. But I did. It was our routine and she was a good sleeper and somehow I think I believed the milk made it so.  I was hesitant to hold firm and feared facing dire consequences.  So I bought every kind of sippy you could imagine to see if it would be the "one" and yet, none of them were. Until one day when she was almost 3, and I'd finally really had enough. I found another new sippy cup and promised myself this was it. And it worked. I didn't cave, Elisa kind of bought that it was a "big girl" cup, and we never looked back. Even when she saw her little sis start drinking from the same bottles she had used just months earlier, Elisa managed to distance herself from them. Those were for "babies" after all.

And now with Carolina, this transition has been another example of her mild temperament. She has been going between the sippy cup and bottle (with milk) for a few months now, and last week I decided to go cold turkey. She really didn't seem to care, only acting a bit off a few times when I would approach her with the new sippy cup in her crib. But after a couple of days with only the sippy for bedtime/naptime, I'd say we are done. No more bottles. Ever. Again.  And who knows if I could have succeeded earlier with Elisa. She definitely screamed and cried and rejected the sippy from Day 1.  But Carolina just gave me a look like "what's this?" And then, "oh, okay, it still has milk."  It was a gift I wasn't going to overlook, and so I took my chance and now she seems fine with this new phase. 

And I haven't even mentioned the paci yet. We managed to forget her pacifier on the trip to North Carolina at the end of September. I realized it about mid-way to the airport and let myself think through a few scenarios first before panicking. It was true she had been fighting taking the paci for a few weeks by then. Starting this summer when we were in Spain, she really didn't want it after finishing her milk. It might help to calm her down if she wasn't sleeping well or needed a little push to fall asleep. More often than not, though I would just leave it in the crib and find her playing with it or sucking on it when she woke up. And then we forgot it. We only had one paci by that point and the thought of buying a replacement kind of annoyed me. So again, we went cold turkey and Carolina was fine. We had to give her a little more milk and a bottle a couple of nights, but she seems to have moved on from needing the paci to soothe herself. It's almost as if now I can't remember her ever having one. So that's it, I'm just writing this all down so I can remember how it happened and how much easier it was this second time. And really, thank God for that.