Bye-Bye, Binkies!

Craig and I finally took away the kids' binkies! This was long overdue, but I'd been waiting until after Disney World. I wanted an easy way to calm the kids down when they were over-tired and out in public (which was pretty much the entire trip!), but once we were home, there wasn't any good reason to keep putting it off. For me, it also seemed like a good idea to hurry up and do this while Craig was still on vacation and could help me deal with the additional whining!

So 2010 will be a pacifier-free year!

We had already told Bentley months ago that we would be giving his binky to a tiny baby who needed it. When the time actually came, he suggested that Baby Jesus could use a binky, so we put all the pacificers in an envelope labeled "Baby Jesus" and put them in the mailbox. (And then promptly threw them away the minute the kids were in bed-- mostly so we wouldn't be tempted to get them back out again!) In addition, we had little presents for each of them to reward them for helping out the tiny baby. Bentley got a Lightning McQueen watch (thanks to my friend Lenee) and Kendra got a little chalk board with Mickey Mouse on it from the dollar store.

It took Bentley a while to fall asleep that first night, which means Kendra was up late, too. At one point when I went into their room, Bentley was crying, "I need something to suck on!" So Kendra joined in by wailing, "Scuba diver took Nemo away!" and doing her best fake crying. That's her favorite thing to say any time, so I wasn't too concerned about her. And there wasn't much I could do for Bentley except tell him everything would be okay.

And eventually it was.

I love this picture for a lot of reasons, but for the purposes of this post,
I'm just showing you how they both looked with their binkies.