The Paci Fairy

If you're a regular on FaceBook, then you've already read my posts about the Paci Fairy's visit to our house. Since one of the purposes of this blog is for documentation, however, you're going to have to endure a full post with all the details. That way if/when we go through this with the next kid, I'll have a lovely and handy guide for The Perfect Way to Ditch the Paci. Ahem.

With advice from Supernanny, Jo Frost, we planted the idea of the Paci Fairy in The Boy's mind. (Prior to that, we made a paper chain with 20 rings that we used to count down the days until he would get rid of his pacis.) On THE DAY, he placed his pacis in a gift bag with a note to the Fairy, explaining that he was giving his pacis away to a baby who might need them. We placed the bag outside the house before his nap, and headed upstairs. He and I both cried a little bit as we sat in our living room, staring at the bag. What a brave boy.

He had his game face on all the way through the pre-nap routine, up until song time, when he cried and cried and cried. And cried and cried and cried and cried. He finally tired himself out on me, fell asleep, and I put him in his crib where he slept for a comparatively short time (one hour instead of his regular two). I attribute this to the assumption that he usually wakes up during his nap, finds his paci and settles back down to sleep. Without the paci, he's lost that skill or desire.

Day two: No nap. He played in his crib for a looooong time and cried for his paci.

Day three: Played in his crib until I went up and rocked him to sleep.

Day four: No nap. At all.

Day five: Enter the sticker chart. He earns one sticker per nap, and a trip to the movie theatre after 12.

He has now napped successfully for four consecutive days, but his naps are definitely shorter. Today's victory was that he put himself to sleep for the first time, without assistance. He stopped asking for his paci several days ago, which is a HUGE victory for us all.

What I have learned: I originally thought we were in the ideal window for getting rid of the paci, since he's old enough to actually understand the explanation for where it went and to take some ownership of the process. I now think that if we had done it sooner, he would better have learned how to soothe himself to sleep, thus his naps would still be long. Then again, it could have backfired. Our reason for wanting to get rid of it now is that a) there will soon be another baby in the house who may use pacis, and if he sees the baby using it for several more years, he might NEVER give it up, and b) we wanted to get rid of them before the transition to the Big Boy Bed. Those beds are HUGE, in comparison to a crib, so a "lost" paci is much more difficult to find.

Props for us: The one thing I absolutely think we did correctly was to wean him off paci usage gradually. As of less than one year (I wish I could remember, exactly), he was only allowed to use them in the car and for sleeping. Then we cut the car usage out, except for long trips where he would take a nap. The good thing about this approach is that we weren't constantly hunting down pacis all over the house, and he wasn't toting them all over town. Yay, us.


"Isn't this exciting." - Sheila, A Chorus Line