A good friend of mine became a Mommy. She's the only person (outside of my family) that I have trusted to watch my babies. I think she was meant to be a Mommy - I've always thought that after seeing her with my own children, but seeing her so flawlessly fall into the Mommy role with her own baby is so much fun to witness
So my baby girls turned 5 and 3. This year it was a Valentine's Party, so everything was hearts! I was running even more behind than normal for the party and I didn't get any pictures of the cakes or the decorations :( I finally started taking pictures during presents and I ran out of memory and had to pause to upload my card :( oops! I think they had fun though :)
I knew that I wanted to have Sammie in the big girl bed, potty trained, and no paci before she turned 3, and I was approaching that pretty quickly! Just like all the other times, I wanted to move her out of the crib and into the big girl bed before I was actually ready to move the next baby into the crib - I never wanted them to feel like the crib was getting taken from them. And since Kolby was not sleeping great in our room anymore and I knew the quicker we moved him the better - that made moving Sammie even more of a priority. We just happened to go to American Furniture and found a mattress on New Years Eve and she was super excited to sleep in it so we decided to go for it. The thing is - I wanted the paci to stay in the crib - so asking her to go to sleep in a big girl bed was a big enough change and on top of that asking her to go to sleep without her paci was huge. She did great that first night, got out of bed a couple times but fell asleep pretty quickly. The second night she decided almost immediately that she wanted to go back to the crib, which we let her do - and the following night, and the next, and so on :) I knew it was mostly because of wanting the paci. She went back and forth a couple times per night, struggling with wanting to sleep in the new bed and also wanting the paci. So we very quickly moved on to the paci situation :) I had heard of people taking them somewhere and having them 'buy' a toy with the paci - then they have a new toy and don't even have the paci anymore. I decided to take her to Build-a-Bear and have them put the paci INSIDE the bear that way she'd still technically have it with her but just couldn't suck on it. When I told Tammy my plan she asked "What if you wake up in the morning and she's ripped open the bear to get to the paci?" :) I hadn't thought of that, I guess I was hoping she'd love it so much that she wouldn't even think about doing that :) So we picked out a bear, brought it over to the girl stuffing the bears and I told Sammie to hand her the paci so she could put it inside and I explained to the girl that we were making a "Paci-Bear". She looked super confused and said, "Well... she won't be able to suck on it then!" Uh - yeah! That's the point :) That night Sammie asked for her paci a couple times and we just reminded her that it was with her - in the bear, and she was happy. She happily went to sleep hugging her new Pacibear :) AND Pacibear survived the night :)
On top of all this we had been dabbling in potty training for months and I decided that I should hurry and do that too before the kids went back to school and we were running everywhere all the time. So adding to all the other changes - we potty trained. It took 1 bad day, and then little accidents here and there and she was good. What an amazing little girl to do all these big changes all at once and be such a trooper! All the sudden. within 2 weeks we had a big girl - no paci, no diaper, no crib!! I'm not good with change and that's a lot of change! She did better than I did :)
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