I am extremely soft-hearted when it comes to Riley. I don’t think twice about her sharing our bed when she wants to, lying down with her if she needs company to go to sleep, reading her a story when I’m trying to get work done or cuddling her through a tantrum. It’s not always convenient, somtimes it’s even boring (I challenge you to sit in a dark room for over an hour and not get at least a little bored) and it can be tiring. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And every now and then something happens that just breaks your heart in a good way.

I have been encouraging Riley to go to sleep on her own. She had been happily going to sleep on her own, but we had a bit of a disruption with our trip and she had been needing me to either sit in the room with her or lie down next to her. So my routine goes something like this. I hug and kiss her goodnight and put her into bed. She gets out of bed and slaps the door. I go back in, put her back into bed and give her another hug and a kiss. Repeat until either she’s tired enough that she’ll go to sleep or if she gets upset I’ll stay in with her. It’s unpredictable, sometimes she’ll go to sleep straight away, sometimes she just can’t. But things are slowly returning to normal.

Tonight we were doing this night time dance and I had gone in for about the third (or fourth) time. I walked into the room and there she was standing there, in the dark with only the night light on. She reached both her hands up, ‘Mummy’. She doesn’t say ‘mummy’ that often, so it’s pretty heart-melting at the best of times. I pick her up and we have a really long cuddle, with her head resting on my shoulder. After a while, I put her back into bed. As I stand up, she looks up at me with those big saucer eyes of hers, reaches out both of her hands, ‘Mummy, Don’t’. No one could resist that. No one. And who would want to?

Needless to say, Mummy didn’t.

I let her eat a chocolate cupcake before lunch. Actually, if you read my blog, you are probably wondering if I give her anything except chocolate.

And it was good!

The Rationaliser: It’s not so bad, there was cacao powder in it

The Guilty Conscience: And refined sugar, you’re totally reaching. I’m not even going to dignify that.

Yet another example:

The munchkin watching TV (or feasting her eyes on ‘kiddy heroin’ – phrase stolen from @flyingfish1970 -it’s ok we’re related it’s highly unlikely she’ll sue)

The Rationaliser: I had to work. YOU try working on the computer with her dragging on your pant leg.

The Guilty Conscience: She’s playing with crayons, if you’d turned off the TV she would have most likely continued playing and not had that creepy blank stare on her face. And not to be picky, but you’re hardly working, you’re taking photos. GOOD LORD! What is THAT?! In the second one she’s eating chocolate AND watching TV. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, I can’t help you.

And finally, the nail in the coffin

The Rationaliser: Giving her a bottle during the day helps her get to sleep.

The Guilty Conscience: Not even you believe that. It helps her get to sleep quicker and with less help from you. This is totally selfish on your part. Oh I give up, somebody hand ME a bottle.

It was bloody hard work to get Riley to take the bottle. I started from when she was only little, because I knew at a certain point I was going to have to go back to work and I wanted to make sure that she could be fed by somebody else. At first she might not have liked it, but she put up with it (to a certain extent). I hated feeding her from a bottle as well, and I think this rubbed off on her a bit as well. But basically, I think she just found the whole thing confusing.

Despite all of this until she was three months old it was relatively easy to give her the bottle (a whole lot easier than the expressing that had to happen to fill up the aforementioned bottle) once a day. Then I’m not sure what happened – I think I must have taken a break from giving her bottles (because she was taking them relatively easily) and the next thing I knew it was complete refusal. She was old enough to shake her head, clam up her lips and generally protest loudly at even the sight of the bottle.

I tried ever bottle known to man. And I was doggedly persistent. In the end the bottle she took first was the Adiri and even then I had to be pretty tough love about the whole thing and the milk had to be really warm and the teat had to be warmed up as well. But amazingly, after a while she would take any bottle and when I weaned her at a year it was onto the bottle.

Now at nearly 17 months old, for someone who used to cry at even the sight of a bottle, she’s very committed to it. I’ve been trying to think of ways to get her off the bottle and on to a cup because I’d like to get rid of the bottle altogether. This is hard when everytime she sees a bottle she giggles, claps and does an excited little dance.

I could take Kim’s approach and wait until she is old enough to better understand what is happening which is pretty tempting and I’m pretty sure that’s how my mum weaned my brother off his bottle. Or there’s always the don’t offer/distraction method. But I guess the main problem is that I haven’t found any way that she will accept milk other than the bottle – ever. Any kind of cup and she just spits it out and it doesn’t matter what temperature it is.

I’m really hoping that getting her to use a cup isn’t nearly as much work as getting her to take a bottle in the first place.