Last Wednesday, after watching an interview with a nanny on the morning news show about weaning off bottles, pacifiers and co-sleeping with parents, I decided to heed the advice and go for the most effective method - cold turkey, meaning that we'll just totally removed the presence of the pacifiers all at one time instead of slowing weaning him off through other methods.
Why did I suddenly decide to do it out of the blue on that day? Well, it was because I was getting more and more worried recently that Ry will be jealous of his baby brother when the second one is born. And therefore, I am getting worried that Ry will become angry with us and think that we do not love him anymore if we start the weaning process only after his second birthday.
So the weaning process started with me going straight to hide all Ry's 4 pacifiers while he was engrossed in his Mickey Mouse show. When he asked for it later, I simply told him that they were thrown away and brought him to the usual place where I kept the pacifiers to show him that there were no more pacifiers. Definitely, he howled and cried pitifully and even attempted to knock his head against the wall to coerce me into giving him the pacifiers. I nearly gave in but I quickly carried him and tried to coax him with his toys and sing to him to soothe him. He stopped wailing after a while and later, I find that he tried to distract himself by taking out his toys to play.
During nap time, there was another struggle and I have to spend more time putting him to sleep but somehow, he managed it without the pacifiers. Probably, he was already tired out. Needless to say, the first night without pacifier resulted in him waking up in the middle of the night crying and searching for it and it took me at least 30 minutes to sing to him to lull him back to sleep. On the whole, I was pretty satisfied with his behaviour as I expected worse from him and his tantrums only limited to mainly sleep time.
Throughout the second and third day, Ry occasionally looked for his pacifiers but he soon realised that they were absent and since stopped looking for them. So it was a pretty quick process that we managed to wean him off the pacifiers.
However, the funny thing I observed was that he sufered from withdrawal systems like drug addicts denied of their drugs. He had lower concentration and was more clumsy, so he fell down more often while walking and climbing. All in all, he accumulated a total of 7 bruises throughout his whole body. Some of them were pretty severe especially the one on his right rib cage by which he bruised himself when he fell from the dining chair and knocked himself against the side of another chair beside it. It was really heartbreaking to see him crying while I tried to apply ointment and pressure to disperse the blood clot. K joked that if we bring him to a doctor now, we'll probably get sued for child abuse. Probably, I'm really abusing him since I denied his sanity and concentration when I removed his pacifiers!
See the big red bruise on his right forehead and there are more of these bruises on his whole body! That was the result of him knocking himself on the stair while climbing the slide at the gym on Wed, which had never happened before as he's a pretty good climber!
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