The Time Was Ripe

“Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is "timing"
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.” ― Fulton J. Sheen

 In parenting, as I have learned, sometimes you just have to wait until the time is ripe. 

Or, rather, if you wait until the time is ripe, things that would have been impossible become simple.

Maeve has always been a paci baby.  She loved that thing since we traded out the soothie from the hospital for a Nuk, the kind she could easily keep in her mouth.  She learned to push it back into her mouth at like, three months.  It drove me nuts when she woke up because it fell out of her mouth.  But Husband and I consoled ourselves that paci use was said to help prevent SIDS, and we spent our waking moments in terror of that symptomless, unpreventable disease. 

As she grew, we tried a few times to introduce the notion that she was old enough for the paci to leave.  This was always met with angry, protective resistance, and usually crying.  And it just didn't feel right in my gut.  She wasn't ready.

She had made a few baby steps this year, given a couple of her pacifiers away to other babies, but she still seemed very resistant to giving them up altogether.  We didn't let her have them at any time but bed and naptime, and that was okay.  But she was still clinging to them, and I decided that while Daddy was getting better from his big surgery, that was not the time to remove them.

But last week, we just matter-of-factly told her at bedtime that pacifiers are for babies and she's a big girl, and we're all done with them now.  No fuss, just the facts.  I said, Do you think you can sleep without one, like a big girl?  And she said yes.  And they've been gone ever since.

And so the last vestiges of babyhood fall away from my daughter.  At least she still has those gorgeous, soft, baby cheeks!!!