This is Going to be as Painful as a Root Canal

We have hit another baby milestone and this is not going to be pleasant.

Most milestones are positive. They are things you celebrate. The first tooth. The first words. The first steps.

I couldn’t have been prouder when I got Sydney to do her first high-five.

We’ve sailed past most of them without a mention in this blog. Sydney has about eight teeth at this point. Honestly, I stopped counting. I still get nervous that she is going to choke to death on my watch, but I think she has enough choppers to chew her way to survival.

Verbally, she is ahead of the game. She repeats just about any word you emphasize for her and she recognizes familiar things and calls them by their name. She can’t say her own name – she actually thinks her name is “baby” and says that every time she sees a picture of herself. I guess that is better than monkey, which someone I know recently said her newborn now answers to.

I also don’t think she can make the “s” sound for Sydney. In fact, some of her words come out funny because she can’t make the sound. She can pronounce happy or apple, but chicka – her favorite toy – comes out ca-ca. Still, she syas a lot more words than others her age.

As far as motor skills go, she is behind. She is walking, but she toddles around like a drunken college student. She is unsteady on her legs and probably falls down about every five steps. I have never seen anyone hit their head so many times without getting a concussion. She could teach NFL players something. She definitely inherited her mother’s hard noggin.

Those were milestones we happily awaited. Now we are dealing with one I dread.  

We are probably starting late on this, but we are going to do away with the bottle. The doctor scared us the other day by saying Sydney “will need a root canal” if she keeps drinking from a bottle.

What kind of doctor tries to scare you like that? As new parents, we are compliant as overmedicated puppies. You tell us what is best for our child, we are all over it. No need to terrify.

I don’t think this is going to be an issue, except at night. As regular readers of this blog know, my daughter does not sleep through the night. She is up at least once, and often twice, every night. This has been going on for 15 months.

Sigh. 

Please spare the advice. More than once we have let her “cry it out.” Two hours or more later, she is still crying and not sleeping. She rants and raves like Donald Trump discussing the “birther” issue. We have found it much easier to give her a bottle; she is back asleep in 15 minutes. That means we are back to sleep in 20.

Getting her to drink from only sippy cups during the day should be easier; she already does this several times a day. But my nights are about to get even more frightful.

She falls asleep every night drinking her bottle and then has one or two more by morning. For months, we have been cutting her night-time milk with water. She gets a 50-50 mixture. (Imagine how that tastes.) So, I am convinced it is not the milk she needs. I think she likes the soothing nature of the bottle and it helps her go to sleep.

Of course, she did wake up the other night screaming “Milk!,” so I could be wrong.

I’m wrong about a lot of things when it comes to parenting. I incorrectly predicted she could sit in the middle of a bed without somehow rolling three feet and bouncing off. I was wrong that my child would somehow like me more than her mother. And I was certainly wrong about not draining the tub after every bath.

So maybe she does need the milk to get her through the night. Hell, I would like a steak sandwich to get me through the night. But just as daddy goes sandwich-less, Sydney is going to have to give up her milk.

We are going to do this on the weekend, so when we only get two hours of sleep, it will not impact the next day's work performance. 

Like I said, it is a milestone I am not looking forward to. I predict a lot less sleep in my future. But root canals are not good for kids, so it needs to happen.