"He loved it so much, he consumed it"*

We had an intervention this week. A traumatic one. We had been putting if off for months, but it got to the point that if we didn't intervene, there would be horrible consequences.

We took away my baby's binkie (in Stinky speak, that means blanket).

I know. Traumatic.

This binkie wasn't even originally made for him. I made it when I was pregnant with the Punk. And the Punk never got attached to it; there were too many other ones to get attached to. He preferred the quilt his grandma made him and he still sleeps with his quilt (which he calls his puppy....don't ask....there's no explanation) every night. So the binkie I made for him just never got used, and we put it away.

Then came along my baby. He, being the second child, did not get a plethora of baby gifts, and as a result had a lot less baby blankets. So we pulled out the handknit blanket and used it for him.

It was love.

He has a ridiculous fondness of this binkie. His fondness involves pulling loops from the stitches and then running his fingers through the loops.

Do you see the potential problem with this? Small loops become big loops, and big loops become safety concerns. I had visions of him wrapping loops around his neck in his crib. Not good visions. We kept a close eye on things, and anytime a loop reached a certain size, I'd snip it and then tie it down. We managed. The binkie got to stay in the bed.

Then he started eating fuzz off the binkie. He would offer binkie fuzz to everyone. "Want some, " he'd say as be picked a small little fuzz ball off his precious item. If you refused it, he would just eat it himself.

My husband started noticing more and more fuzz behind the crib when he vacuumed. I noticed more and more loops that had to be snipped. So, we made that difficult decision; the binkie had to go. We took away the binkie and placed it in our room for safe keeping. Stinky kept asking at night where it was and we'd tell him it was in the wash. This lasted a few nights. Then he somehow sniffed it out in our bedroom (like a homing beacon). We took it away again, this time hiding it in a very high spot that only I can reach (being the tallest in the family).

We then searched through the baby boxes in the basement to find a suitable replacement. We found a lovely little one that had no risk of loops or fuzz. Stinky has started to call it his "nice soft binkie" and seems to have grown a little bit of an attachment to it in the last few days, much to our relief.

But, it's still sad. Mostly for me. To see that loved and much used binkie up in our closet. The one I made for our first baby. The one I made with no thought for what would become of it. No idea that it would be so tattered and torn, not by our first, but our second, and our last. I will save that binkie. I might give it to the Stink one day when he's older; show him the lovable damage he inflicted on it.

Or I might not.

I might just keep it for me.


*this is what my husband said when trying to figure out why Stinky was eating the fuzz