Mason was never a baby that was super addicted to his pacifier. We would give him the paci as a baby throughout the day for comfort and to sleep. Around 9 months as the pediatrician started mentioning taking it away we "transitioned" to just giving it to him when he was going to sleep in his crib. This didn't seem to be a difficult transition at all as he didn't seem to even notice. We kept being told that it was time to get rid of it & we knew it probably was but we felt like he was only taking it to sleep and we wanted to sleep too so we would fight that battle whenever we were ready.
Around 14 months I noticed something wasn't quite right with his top lip tie it was completely tiedto his 2 front teeth. Apparently being lip tied is something that is pretty common and easily fixed when he is older & the pediatrician said not to worry about it at all. At our 15 month check up she did tell us that if we kept letting him use his paci at night it could cause some big problems with his teeth since he is lip tied. So we decided to bite the bullet and just get it over with. Blake was home for 5 days over the 4th weekend so we decided we would just do it together. (looking back to last year we sleep trained over the 4th of July weekend....why do we decide to do major things that weekend?!)
On Friday when Blake went off to work we put Mason down for a nap just like normal with his paci. When he woke up I put away all of his paci's except for 1. I clipped a little bit of the tip off and gave it to him. It clearly wasn't enough because he held it in his mouth and ran around smiling.
So once I got it back I clipped it in half and gave it back to him. He tried to put it in his mouth but noticed it wasn't right. He looked at me, took it out and I said oh no, it's broken. I gave it to him several times throughout the morning so in his mind he would grasp that this is now what a paci is like. He would take it, put it in his mouth then take it out and throw it down. Then he started taking it from me looking at it and seeing it was broken and just dropping it and running off to play. At nap I decided we would just give it a try. I gave him his fox and broken paci & he tried to put it in, didn't like it so he threw it down and went to sleep. Not a single tear! We were shocked!
At bedtime that night I did the same thing. This time he did actually cry. He fussed for about 20 minutes. This was the first time I wanted to just bite the bullet and give him. We have given in once before when transitioning to something and he has completely ran with it so I went and got in the bathtub & he went to sleep.
The following day I didn't give him his paci at all for naps. There was a little bit of fussing but nothing over 5-10 minutes before going to sleep. That evening before bedtime he even when over tot he trashcan with me and he threw it away.
At bedtime that evening we faced our first big challenge. He went back and forth between fussing & playing for a little over an hour but eventually went to sleep.
Day & night 3 were much easier. There was little to no fussing and he seemed to completely forget about the paci all together.
As we went to bed ourselves on the third night we looked at each other and both said why didn't we do this sooner?! The anticipation & fear was definitely worse than the actual process of taking it away.
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