Paci Fairy

If you read my friend Emily's blog, then you know we totally copied her idea. Both of our 2 year olds were still sleeping with the pacifier & we were determined to graduate from it :)

 

Sadie has always loved her pacifier. It started a few days after she was born & her passion only ignited the older she got. When she turned 1, we officially took it away from her during the day & she was only allowed to have it when she slept. I was hoping we would have gotten rid of it before she turned 2, but Bryan thought we had too much going on with Sophie being born to take it away then, but now that Sophie has been around for a while, it was definitely time.

 

Emily & I had heard about the paci fairy from friends & since she successfully tried it at her house, I decided to follow her idea & try it here as well. I wanted to wait for a weekend though so if things went horrible, we had the weekend to recuperate :) Thank goodness we did......

 

On Friday night, after we got Sadie ready for bed, we took her downstairs to the front porch. We explained to her that only babies (like Sophie) had pacifiers & that big girls didn't, so it was time to pass our pacifiers on to other babies who needed them. And that's where the pacifier fairy comes in :) She took both of her pacifiers & placed them in the bag to leave on the front porch for the paci fairy. She acted like she understood, but deep down I don't think she got it.

 

 

We also explained to her that when the paci fairy came to pick up the pacifiers, she would leave a gift. I think that's what helped us in this situation - a little bit of bribery always works!

 

She went up to bed pretty easily but as soon as Bryan left the room, she went ballistic. I believe it took her about 1 hour & 45 minutes before she calmed down. We had to watch her on the video monitor the entire time because she was crying, screaming & trying to climb out of her crib. That's right - she learned she could get out of her crib :( Eventually she fell asleep & made it through the night and when she woke up, she didn't even ask for them. I thought she would wake up crying trying to look for them but it was like she forgot about them. She didn't even remember about the paci fairy - we had to remind her about her present on the front porch!

 

 

In case you are wondering, no, I didn't go buy anything. You know I am too frugal for that! Since her birthday & Christmas are so close together, I had saved a lot of her presents & put them at the top of her closet to get out later. She did unwrap these back in December, but she had already forgotten about them. My mom gave her these diapers & this diaper bag full of goodies for her babies. But the first thing she did was check the bag to see if her pacifiers were in there or not.....

 

 

After that, she moved on & started playing with her new toys:

 

 

The good news is that her nights got much easier after the first one. We really haven't had any problems with her going to sleep without them, except for her naps. On Saturday, it was ridiculous. She cried & screamed & threw all of her toys out of the crib & took off her diaper - over & over for 3 hours. She NEVER went to sleep, which is really unlike her. On Sunday, she did this for about 2 hours & then she finally napped for about an hour. On Monday it was an hour & by yesterday she was back to normal with her 3 1/2 hour nap. Whew - thank goodness! I had no idea how dependent on her paci she was, especially during her naps! Thankfully we only had 1 hard night & a couple of rough afternoons, but I am proud to say that our big girl is now paci free. Well, one of them is!

 

Thanks again Emily for sharing your idea & thanks Mom for letting us recycle one of your gifts :)