Tonight will be night number one without The Dictators soother.
I would be such a big fat liar if I said I was fine with this; but the truth be told I am so not fine with it. For one it means my little boy is officially a big kid, and more importantly I have lost the ability to plug him to get him to calm down. The soother was a big tool the only quiet inducing tool in my parenting arsenal you know?
What finally brought me to this decision?
This week I had a few people over from my Mom Group for lunch and a playdate and my friend DogMama was telling me how Mayson has been without her soother for a week now and it wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be. This made me think that maybe it was fine time to ditch our soothers, because like DogMama said “do you really think it is going to get any easier”? Hell to the no it wasn’t going to get easier, I was just hoping he would grow out of them and decide he didn’t need them anymore.
Heh. I much prefer when my child takes care of his own parenting needs…
Knowing in my heart that this was never going to happen I decided that today was the day.
After nap-time I piled all the soothers I could find into the soother jar and hauled The Dictator off to Toys ‘R Us (first we picked up Grandma Danielle). The deal was that he was supposed to hand his jar of soothers over to the cashier to pay for his new toy that he picked out. First my darling son picked out two annoying and loud toys (a talking Mater from Cars and a fire station) and second he was much too distracted by the giant gumball machine at the checkout to even care about giving up the soothers.
To top it off AFTER I explained the situation to the idiot casher she was so confused she gave The Dictator back his soothers. What about the following conversation is so hard to understand?:
Me: My son is going to give you a jar of soothers as payment for his new toy – please put that jar in this non see-through green bag and hand it back to me after OK?
Her: OK. That will be 35$ please.
Me: Whip out debit card – have The Dictator cermoniously hand over the soothers in the jar….
Her: Oh you want to buy this jar of assorted soothers too?
Me: Um no, he is paying you with the soothers that go in the green bag right?… wink wink.
Her: Oh.
Her: Hands the jar of soothers back to The Dictator, who is thankfully distracted by the gumball machine.
Me: Do me a favor, make sure you don’t tell the kids there is no Santa Claus at Christmas OK? That would be a total deal breaker….
This was not a smart girl.
When we got to the car we made a fuss over how big The Dictator was and how all the little babies would like to have his soothers that he left at the store. He seemed pretty OK with it but MY chest felt tight and I was breathing funny and tearing up at the same time. I seriously was freaking out on the inside.
Edited to add:
WTF was I so concerned about? The kid asked for it a few times before bedtime and then went to sleep last night with no issues whatsoever.
Obviously I was the one with the issues.
I’m not looking forward to the weening of the soother due to the fact that Danger’s soother is actually her thumb and you can’t just give that shit to a cashier and hope she’s not retarded!