We took Brooke to the ward Christmas party to meet Santa Claus. She was anxious about getting to Santa, but when the time finally came she wasn’t too keen at being on Santa’s lap. It turns out that she was just wanting the treat bags that Santa was handing out.
Brooke was enraptured by one of the little girls of the ward who was trying to unwrap a piece of candy. Brooke, our little chow hound.
A very quick recap of last year’s Christmas festivities in the Thomas house.
[quicktime]http://blog.dallasgolden.com/Media/ChristmasMovie.mov[/quicktime]
Things are going far better in the paci department than I dared hope they would. Brooke is taking this pretty well. There have been a few nights where it’s taken her close to an hour to fall asleep, but she hasn’t been hysterically crying; she mostly just whimpers and hollers at us.
Now when I give Brooke her paci she looks at it, sees if the end is snipped, and since it is, she says, “Ew!” Once she even handed back the paci when I gave it to her. I guess soon we’ll see if she wants to throw them away and we’ll be rid of them once and for all.
I’ve been dreading this day for 18 months. Yesterday we decided to start the process of weaning Brooke from her pacifier.
It seemed like a good idea. Up until now she really only used her pacifier to go to sleep. However, lately I could see she was starting to get more attached to it and I wanted to end that before it got out of control. She just learned how to say “paci” and would say it a lot. She also figured out how to pull the basket containing her pacifiers off her shelf so she could get them. When she got hurt, she would beg for paci. Dallas and I decided that this week we’d get ourselves a paci-less daughter.
Dallas’s sister told us that she cut the ends of the pacifiers off a little at a time to wean her children. That seemed like a good idea so we snipped Brooke’s pacifier.
It was HILARIOUS to watch Brooke try to figure out why her good friend paci wasn’t acting the way it was supposed to. She would put it in her mouth in every direction, try to suck, and it wouldn’t work. She’d take it out and inspect it. I felt kind of bad for snipping her paci and a little worse for finding her predicament so funny.
We put her down for her nap. I would walk by her room and hear murmers of “Paci,” and “Uh oh.” It took her a while to fall asleep, but she finally did without too much fussing. However, she didn’t sleep for very long.
Then it was bedtime. Again we gave her paci and she was confused. We put her to bed and again it took her a little longer to fall asleep, but once she did, she didn’t wake up until 8:30 in the morning. Angel.
When we went in to get her, she’d chucked her pacifier out of the crib and didn’t care about retrieving it. I think we’re making good progress.
She took a bad nap again today, but hopefully bedtime will be good. We have our fingers crossed.
The other day Brooke and I were playing with her wooden blocks. I was balancing a block tower on the top of my head and of course Brooke’s favorite thing to do with the blocks is to knock over the towers I make for her. Now Brooke isn’t quite tall enough to reach the blocks on the top of my head, so being the problem solver she is, she whacked me on the side of the head to get the blocks to fall. It worked and Mom thought it was pretty hilarious. It’s amazing that she understands the cause and effect of things.
