Operation Stop With The Bop, Part 1

Outcome: Failure

We've been saying for months now that we need to wean Luca from her Bop (aka pacifier, nuk, paci, binkie....for us it's The Bop), but we keep putting it off. We decided to wait until she was 1, but once she hit that landmark, we concentrated on getting her off the bottle first. She's now off the bottle - - - which was nowhere NEAR as bad as we thought it would be - - - so we decided to bite the bullet and start weaning.

We've slowly been getting her accustomed to only having The Bop when in the car, at naps, or at bedtime. Most of the time she does ok, but any parent who has a baby addicted to a pacifier will tell you it's not that easy. You other parents of Bop lovers will know all too well what happens when your baby is little and the Bop is the buffer between sanity and pulling your hair out. Baby cries...in goes the Bop. Mad at sitting in her carseat? It's Bop Time!!!

And then, you go to put your sweet darling to bed one night, and Where in the hell is the Bop???! You panic. You frantically rummage through every basket, toy bin, diaper bag, purse, and compartment of your car in the mad search for a Bop to stick in that sweet baby mouth before the soft baby whimper becomes an inconsolable baby wail. With no Bop to be found, you throw your shoes on and run to Target in your jammies, dashing through the doors at 9:55, hair and eyes wild, and grab 3 packages of your baby's favorite Bop. You COULD just buy one package, which would leave you with one Bop for your surely now-frantic baby at home and one extra to stash somewhere safe, but you know better than that! Bops are magical...they seem to disappear faster than you can purchase them. You have 6 Bops now, but give it a week and you'll be making another Target run because you can't find a SINGLE Bop in the house!

So, with all this spontaneous Bop disappearance going on, you'd think that weaning would be easy enough. At some point, in theory, you should just be able to stop BUYING the damn things and then the baby will run out. But then you discover that Bops have a tendency to magically re-appear just when you least want them to. So even though we gave a good attempt at slowly weaning her from it by only giving her one at certain times, there have been many occasions where she suddenly comes out from behind the recliner, Bop in mouth, and you say to yourself Where the HELL did that come from....and how much dog hair did she just ingest?!?!?

Since our attempt at passive weaning wasn't working, we decided yesterday to just try cold turkey. Except, admittedly, it was bad planning on our part given that she had her 12 month appointment (meaning 4 shots) and is getting her second top tooth. The result: a stunning failure. She woke from her evening nap, and we took the Bop away and put it in the little table next to our couch. And then we spent the next one hour and 12 minutes listening to her cry inconsolable tears. We're talking red faced, please remember to breathe, real life tears. So we caved. We gave her the Bop, and 13 seconds later she was playing happily.

Failure.

We'll try again. A friend suggested we tell her Bops are 'icky' or 'for babies' and have her help us throw them away. Her mom did this with her younger sister and it worked like a charm. I would love to try it, but our little addict needs something more like 12 steps. If we threw her Bop away, I have not a single doubt in my in my mind that she would cry like we'd kicked a puppy, knock the trash can over, climb in, scrounge around like a wild raccoon, and dig The Bop out of the pile of coffee grounds and banana peels...VICTORIOUS over us once again!!!

So, we carry on. We'll wait a few days and try again. Wish us luck with Phase 2 of Operation Stop With The Bop.