Bye Bye Bottle and Binky!

So last week was a bit crazy. Between Micah getting a mysterious high fever for a few days (he NEVER runs fevers) and taking my car in for unexpected expensive car repairs (you don't realize how spoiled you are until you have to go down to 1 car for a few days!) we decided to take away Hailey's bottle and binky...binki...binkie. (How do you spell that anyway?!) If it was going to be a bad week we might as well get it all out at once! I wasn't too stressed about the binky yet but I did want to take it away from her sooner than we did Micah...that was miserable! Hailey has never been too attached to it and only liked it when sleeping so I hoped that it wouldn't be too difficult. And I was right! She only asked for it once and other than that she has done marvelous without it! The bottle was another story. Not only did it take us 5 months just to get her to drink milk instead of formula she absolutely refused to drink milk from a sippy cup. I tried flavoring it different ways, I tried different cups, I tried EVERYTHING I could think of and she would take one sip and then throw the cup at me. I also realized that the bottle was a security blanket for me too. When Hailey would be cranky and I needed to get something done I'd just give her a bottle and she'd be happy. And who wants to keep a 1 year old from being happy? But considering the fact that she will be 20 months old in a few days and I hate it when toddlers, obviously too old for bottles, are walking around with them I decided we better get started. With Hailey's stubbornness it might take until kindergarten. So we resorted to tough love and would not give her anything in a sippy cup but milk and packed the bottles away. When it comes to difficult toddlers Hailey takes the cake. She held strong and would not even touch her cups. So I tried being sneaky and putting milk in cups she couldn't see through and told her it was water. She was NOT fooled. The days were filled with nothing but crying and whining for water. She didn't care about the bottle she just wanted something else in her cup. I started to get worried when she was no longer having wet diapers. Not to mention days of crying tends to get on ones nerves. I was about to give in and eat my words about toddlers with bottles when on Thursday she took her first sip of milk without saying "Yuck! Don't like it!" By the end of the day she drank a full cup a milk! Yeah! She still isn't drinking a lot but she does more and more each day. So I think it's official...no bottle + no binky = no more baby. Now I'm kinda sad. Not about the bottle or binky but that my baby is growing up! But I guess she still wears diapers so the baby part lingers a little bit!