You guys! My house is officially bink free! Finally. And the craziest thing is, I didn’t plan anything or have any big ceremonial good bye. Basically this all happened without any of my doing. These kids man… they have their own ideas of how to get through life I guess.

LeLe started with a bink in the hospital. I read all these articles about nipple confusion and I was terrified to give her a pacifier, but after two days of her turning my poor nipples into bloody messes, I gave in and gave her a bink. And she loved it. Like seriously loved it. I think in the course of the three years she had binks, she probably went through at least fifty. It was constant. I would buy them in bulk off of amazon and hide the new ones in my dresser so I had one ready when she needed them. She used them for comfort and it genuinely helped her go to sleep at night and for naps. About a year ago, I started wanting to wean her from them but I didn’t know how and I was worried that because Little Bug was using them too, she would just steal his if I took hers away.

We started with a rule that she couldn’t have them outside of the house. This actually worked really well, and it morphed into that she couldn’t have them in the car, only in the house. Then she started preschool and her interest in them starting fading a bit. None of the other kids had binks, and she started repeating the “no binks at preschool,” which really seemed to help.

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Little Bug started his binks in the hospital. We packed a few in his hospital bag and gave one to him on his first day. He was never too attached to them, and in fact at around 9 months he really only used them at the very beginning of nap or bedtime. He would frequently spit them out during the night and I never had to put one back in to settle him.

So fast forward to February of this year, and Little Bug and LeLe were both using the same style of binks and they were both chewing on them, which was both annoying, and super unsafe. We were going through binks at a pretty rapid pace and I was annoyed, so Mr. Cereal bought the kids some chewies and started encouraging them to use them in the car and when we were hanging out at home. This actually helped a lot and Little Bug stopped using a bink during the day at all.

About two weeks after we got the chewies, Little Bug dropped the bink altogether. I honestly don’t even know exactly what happened, but one night I noticed that he didn’t use a bink to fall asleep and I couldn’t remember the last night that he did use a bink. So I was all of a sudden down to one kid using a bink in the house and I was sooo ready to be done with them.

And then one night a few weeks later, LeLe fell asleep early (thanks to no naps) and her bink was downstairs in a bag. She didn’t ask for it, and when she woke up in the morning, we went on through our normal day. That night she fell asleep early again, no bink again. The next day, I gathered up all the binks left in the house and threw them away. It felt like the time had come to get this done, so I took a stance and decided no more binks, even if she asked for one. Three days later she asked me in the morning where her bink was and I said she was a big girl now and didn’t need the bink anymore. She cried for about two seconds, then got her Peppa Pig playset out and went on with her day.

We’ve overcome a bink obsession in our house and lived to tell the tale. One thing I have noticed since the bink is gone is how much my daughter talks. I mean, I knew before that she was chatty, but my goodness, this girl is a never ending stream of words. With the bink in her mouth, she talked a lot less and it is very apparent to us now. Moral of the story is, sometimes you really win at this whole parenting thing because your kids do the work all by themselves. Now to get the little one potty trained…