As I've written, Audrey loves her pacie. We've been trying to wean her off of it for some time and so she doesn't get one at all during the day. I mean, she's 3 1/2 for crying out loud. She'll get out of bed and head downstairs with it still in her mouth and will put up a fight about taking it out but ultimately it's either she puts the pacie on the kitchen counter or heads back upstairs to her bedroom. And she generally complies if it comes to that.
For awhile we were getting her to put the pacie in her bedside table drawer but she generally refuses to do that now in the name of keeping the darn thing in her mouth for just a few minutes longer. I guess it's like chewing gum for another moment or two to get that last bit of flavor. And sometimes she'll put it in one of the kitchen drawers instead of on the counter which means at bedtime we end up in a frantic search for the pacie. Her memory is excellent so I'm pretty sure she always knows where it is - it's just that she likes watching mommy and daddy get frustrated searching for it.
But the best is when she is asleep in her bed and the pacie has fallen out of her mouth, which it usually does after she is completely zonked out. And then she wakes up in the middle of the night and we hear, "where's my PACIE!!!" as if her life depended on it. And if we don't respond the yelling will escalate until Grace is woken up and we suddenly have a house full of tired, irritable parents and yelling and crying babies.
When one of us heads into her room to find the pacie it is almost never far away. It may be under a pillow or beneath the sheets or something but if she'd only spend 3 seconds looking for it she'd find it. But it doesn't matter - it could be floating in front of her face in full view and she still wouldn't "find" it. This is where the princess side of Audrey shows itself I guess because mommy or daddy must provide the pacie to her in order to stop the ruckus. And then it's back to sleep as if nothing happened - for Audrey at least. The other members of the household have to crawl back into bed and find their way back to sleep and if Grace is awake you can write off the next 20 minutes of sleep at least.
One of these days the pacie will be gone entirely but Audrey can be a tough cookie. She's back in her bed now which is good and I think the pacie will be the next transition. The fact that Grace has one doesn't help though. Perhaps we'll have to bribe her with jelly beans (more on that later perhaps) to break her of it. In the meantime we're spending part of each day finding pacies.
