Textbook Parenting

It had been a little over 24 hours since pacey had done a gainer off the end of Salto do Tororó. Nap on Day 1 did not go well. Despite having gotten up at 4:30 a.m., Pete cried for an hour before falling asleep for 30 minutes, then getting up and crying for another hour. During the day, he was fine. He barely asked for pacey at all. But the kid had yet to figure out how to put himself to sleep without it.

After work, we took Pete to the toy store to pick out a special toy just for him to make his heart feel better. I had heard the expression ‘like a kid in a candy store’, but the same could be said of Pete in Brazil’s tiniest toy store. Thank goodness there are no Targets or Toys ‘R’ Uses. Though the toy store was the size of a broom closet, it took Pete a half hour to zone in on what he wanted (or, more accurately, what I had already picked out for him that was within our limited budget), an Imaginext sky racer plane that was 90 Brazilian reais or approximately 45 U.S. dollars. The same plane retails on Amazon for $11.99.

But my son was in pain. His heart was hurting. He had acted all day like he’d been dumped by his girlfriend. Drastic measures were in order to avoid the heartache of the previous night. You couldn’t put a price on this plane, reais or otherwise.

After a special dinner for Peter at our favorite burger ‘n’ shakes restaurant, we went home, guarded against the prospect of another night filled with heart-wrenching tears. I had spent my free moments earlier in the day Googling “giving up pacifier cold turkey”, to get an idea of how many days of this we would have to endure. I stumbled upon parenting websites where clever moms proudly blogged about the various tricks they’d employed to rid their children of pacifiers. Mothers who sabotaged their children’s pacifiers by snipping the tips off of them so as to eliminate the resistance seemed deceitful. It seemed overtly cruel—regardless of how effective it might have been—to do on purpose to a pacifier what Sam had done by accident. Mothers who took their children to Build-A-Bear and had the pacifiers sewn inside a stuffed animal seemed naïve. Pete was way too smart to fall for that. He would’ve taken a kitchen knife to the chest of that stuffed animal and carved the pacifier right out of its cotton stuffing heart.  Interestingly, no one had thrown the pacifier over the edge of a waterfall.

Later, when sharing these vignettes with Elise, I optimistically (though, perhaps, a little cynically) commented that I had read only success stories. All the children on parenting blogs gave up there pacifiers….eventually. Or, no one was going to go on the internet and blog that after 10 days of screaming and crying, they finally caved, rushed to the drug store and bought a trove of new pacifiers. It either didn’t happen, or it happened all the time and all the failed mothers and fathers in the world were too ashamed to admit it in online public fora.

We came home. Did face-bath, hand-bath, foot-bath (a blog post in its own right) and slipped on pjs. We brushed teeth. I read Sam a chapter out of a Magic Treehouse book while Pete played with his new plane on Sam’s bed. The whole time, Elise and I waited for the other shoe to drop. The whole time, I kept waiting for Peter to ask, “Where’s pacey?”

I closed the book and put Sam in his bed. I asked Pete if he wanted to sit with me. He pointed to his bed. He wanted to lie down. I picked him up and put him in his crib. I gave him his plane and a book on planes (for good measure). A few moments later, he pitched them both on the floor. Elise came in a rubbed his back a few times. He might have said something then about pacey. I’m not sure as I fled the room shortly thereafter, hoping to escape what I was sure was still coming. Elise told him good night and left the room. A few minutes later, he was asleep.

The next morning at the breakfast table—airplane in tow—Pete announced, “Me throw pacey in waterfall, get a new toy, bigger boy!”

I smiled at Elise. Textbook.

I don’t want to jinx us. Day 2 is shaping up to be exponentially better than Day 1, but we may not be entirely out of the woods yet. I still have to wait tosee if I get my chance to brag on a parenting advice website.