No more bottles!

It was a tough go, but we did it! We can officially say we are done with "ba-bas" in this house. My doctor recommended getting Elle off of them once she turned 18 months, so that's what we did. She was quite sad for about 4 days and nights. I would usually give her one in the morning, and then one before each nap, and then one at midnight,.. 2:00,.. 4:00,.. 7:00...yah, no joke, it was like she was a newborn again. I don't even know how we got back into that horrible schedule, it just sort of started happening. She'd wake up and ask for it, and her being such a cutie, and me being such a push-over, didn't make for a good combination. So we would go down to the kitchen in the dark, get the bottle out of the dish washer, pour the milk, warm it up in the microwave, go back up to my room, feed her, rock her back to sleep (doing all of this with one eye half open), just so that I could keep her happy and let everyone else sleep. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it some nights, but most nights? Not so much. I was taking one for the team...haha. It was funny because Andy would sort of sleep through all those nightly feedings, and one time when I'd had enough with the whole thing, I broke down and told him what horrible habit I'd gotten Elle into, he was amazed and quite annoyed with how bad I can mess a good thing up...she had been sleeping through the night for like 9 months prior to all this since I'd stopped nursing. Anyway, all the ba-ba tears are behind us now. It was just so cute and sad at the same time when she would go open the dishwasher to find one, and not seeing it there, would just throw herself down on the door and cry. It's already been a really great thing (not to mention the awesome night's sleep I'm getting), she's really starting to talk more, and just seems happier and able to handle being sad, and then calms down on her own without the companion of a bottle. I love that cute, little chick, and am so proud of her for going through that little rough patch in the growing up process.