The binky, the binky, OOH! I love the binky!!

Amos enjoyed his birthday and then the harsh reality of being 3 years old hit. At some point in the past few years, we decided that the binky would go after his third birthday. On Tuesday, we started that process.

I was totally prepared to go to Toys 'R' Us and get some sort of awesome giant monster truck toy or something, but when I asked Amos what he wanted, he said, "A Clifford sprinkler."

Oh! Well we had one of those in the basement that Santa GrrDada and GrrMama brought at Christmas time. And since it was too cold at Christmas, we put it in the basement to save for summer.

So since I was spared a trip to the giant toy store, we went ahead and collected the binkies, put them in an envelope and sent them off to the "Special Binky Place." Amos helped collect them (sucked on them for a solid 10 minutes before putting them into the envelope), put them in the envelope and then put them in the mailbox. A minute later, Amos opened the door, to a box! He opened the box and it was a Clifford sprinkler, hooray!
Clifford spent the morning with us, going in the car on the way to the store, watching a Clifford show with Amos.

At nap time, the reality hit. We were going up the stairs to his room and he elp but he was talking about the things he was going to see in his bed. It was then that he broke down and started crying, realizing he sent his binkies away. "I want my binkies back," he said. We had to remember our earlier talk about how he is a big boy now and doesn't need a binky. And then we remembered how he got a cool new Clifford sprinkler. It didn't really help but he finally calmed down and went to bed. It took him a few minutes to go to sleep. And he only slept for an hour.

That afternoon, we played in the sprinkler and it was really fun. But that night, we had the same scene, crying as we went upstairs and frequent wake ups.

It has been a long week, to say the least. Amos keeps asking for his binkies and for the first few nights, we were up ALOT.

But it's getting better--Amos slept through the night the last two nights and has gone back to two hour naps, with one wake-up. It's been tough for him--his binkies were the one material thing he loved on this earth. It's hard because we knew that he would be really dependent on them, when we started the whole binky mess. But they helped us get through some tough times, so, oh well!

Amos is on his way to being a really big boy!!