It not her dummy, it’s mine!

My husband and I have been giving each other thumbs up for the past 24 hours because…. Lucy is dummyless! This means that we have officially purged our home of all means of sucking devices wether it be a dummy, bottle, teat or anything in-between. I feel positively liberated! No more losing small parts in a basin of bubbly water, or trying to figure out where the hell to put them in a dishwasher when you just don’t care that much anymore, or worse, discovering you do really care when you find them in the dishwasher filter! Ugh!
From now on, if my kids want a drink at night they can learn how to pick up a cup from a side table, sit up, take a sip and put it back on the table. Hooray for me! No more tea stains on my linen!
So, as you can probably guess, I’m quite pleased with myself but that’s not the reason I’m writing about it. What I really want to express is just how much more this step depended on me rather than on Lucy. I have seen few children as attached to their dummy as much as Lucy was (well, she still is really.). The thought of getting her off it wasn’t merely worrying, it actually frightened me! Such is this child’s self-assertiveness that the thought of taking this dummy away reminded me of beating my own head against a rock… with sharp jaggedly bits sticking out. About a month ago, it was almost as if she got even more protective over it and started carrying two dummies with her where ever she went. Around about the same time, I started getting annoyed with it. My daughter has such a fantastic vocabulary and she communicates so well. Almost every time she spoke to me she would be speaking through this blasted dummy and I would say, as I always have but with an increased tone of irritation, “Lucy, I cannot understand you when you talk to me with your dummy in your mouth, ” and she would take it out and repeat herself.
Then, on Sunday morning, she asks if she could have an easter egg and out of the blue I reply, “the tooth fairy says that I am not allowed to give you anymore treats until you hand over your dummy forever.” It took her about 2.5 seconds to give me both dummies. I don’t know where it came from but I think that deep inside, I had, had enough of this pestiferous pacifier and was ready to let it go. I reminded her that it was forever and made sure she understood and that was that. I think the key is that no-one in the family has made a big deal out of it. I don’t congratulate her on surviving without a dummy because she doesn’t need it and she is handling it beautifully. So am I for that matter! I have made a point of giving her extra cuddles when she is missing it but she has her mousy. Lucy’s dummy has been attached to mousy since she was old enough to crawl for this exact time, so that when the dummy has gone, she has mousy for comfort. See my post entitled, “The Dummy”.
So far, it’s been as easy as falling off a log. Mainly because I realised that it was I who had the aversion to letting the dummy go, as soon as I accepted that and did something about it, so did Lucy. Gotta love parenting, so many life lessons here!