Goodbye Souci...and my baby

We've finally done it. McKay no longer uses a pacifier! Hooray! I feel so relieved and proud...yet at the same time I feel sad. He is now potty trained and we took away the binky. Now all he has to do is learn to read and he's practically a man. He's not my baby anymore, and that makes me a little sad. I guess I have another actual baby, so I shouldn't be too worked up about it, but oh my goodness!..how time flies. Babyhood is so fast. Okay, back to the good news. McKay loves, loves, loves his pacifier, or souci as we call it. Brian has been wanting to get rid of it for some time now, but I was very reluctant. He just loved it so much. It brought him comfort and soothed him like nothing else could...it put him right to sleep...it was the best emergency bribe...it just made him happy. He loved it and I loved it for him. It seems like for the last year or so he's only had it for napping and bedtime. Then when Ellery was born, somehow it kept creeping out of the bedroom and into McKay's mouth more and more. And it didn't matter what kind of souci it was- he was not at all against borrowing Ellery's. These photos are proof. This one was one of my niece Ashlyn's that she didn't use. He took the pink thing home one day and sported the very manly "I Love my Mommy" no questions asked.

Well one night at bedtime last week we couldn't find any of them. There are about three of them floating around the house and I was pretty sure one was made up in our bed, but before I could go search for it Brian looked at me and said, "There's no time like the present." I agreed and we told McKay that his souci was lost. He was kind of confused but miraculously got into bed anyway, and was easily distracted by a song when he asked for it while Brian was snuggling with him. He didn't even cry that first night! I was amazed. I had been dreading doing this for so long because I thought not only would it be annoying and hard, but it would just break my heart. Turns out it was neither. Since then he's asked for it maybe twice a day. He also suggested that we go to the store and buy a new one when we kept telling him it was lost. Smart kid. So we changed our story and started telling him that he was a big boy and that only babies had a souci. What can I say, McKay really enjoys being a big boy. He goes to bed just fine without it and can easily be sidetracked if he remembers it. What a relief!