growing up - a tale of woe

poor ava! it's been quite the trying two weeks for my little muffin. on saturday, june 1st, mean mommy and daddy took away her bottle. on friday, june 6th, they stole her binky too!

here's how it all went down . . .

the bottle

ava's induction into bottleholics anonymous was actually a bit of an accident. we'd planned to take away both binky and bottle on june 6th. on june 1st, i got a bit curious how bad the bottle part would be and handed ava a sippy cup instead of her bedtime bottle. amazingly, she did not throw it across the room in disgust, so i figured . . . well . . . let's just go with it.

after that things went both better and worse than i thought. bizarrely, ava never once asked for her bottle. now, we're talking about a 22 month old who knows words like "elephant", "fairy", "beautiful", "special" and "hiding" - lack of vocabulary was not the problem here. i think she was mainly confused. she would hear the microwave beep and would exclaim "milk coming! milk coming!". we'd bring her the sippy cup of milk, and she would take it, take a sip, and then continue to say "milk coming? milk coming?", in a dazed, confused, and hopeful tone of voice.

this tailed off after a couple of days, but what did not ramp up was her actually consumption of liquids . . . especially milk! suddenly ava's favorite part of the day became her most hated, and we've had to resort to every trick in the book to get her to consume a minimal amount of milk per day (see video). when we're feeling less creative, we are reduced to "co-watching" an episode of little bear with her, while pouring milk into her distracted little mouth.

the binky

for the end of binky, we engaged in the traditional "binky gifting" ritual - gathering up all our binkys, wrapping them up pretty and delivering them to paulo's little sister (who actually hates pacifiers - don't tell ava!). i'm not sure ava really got the point at the time, and paulo certainly confused things by trying to give them back to ava as we headed out the door. she got the point that night though . . . and boy was she not happy!

what followed was probably a typical binky-free transition. three nights of 1+ hours of full throttle howling, 1 night of 1 hour of muttering, and 3 nights (and counting) of 1 hour of talking ourself to sleep. the situation was greatly complicated by ava's coincidental discovery of how to remove her own "snuggler" (sleep sack). she would take it off, and then be immediately infuriated that she could not get it back ON again. for some reason it took us three nights to try out the well known trick of putting the snuggler on backwards - worked like a charm!