Another month passed, another milestone achieved.

Somewhere between October 23rd and November 17th—which day it was we don’t know, because we didn’t know it would be the last time until later—little EC stopped chewing on her “biting blankies”. These are the soft plush blankets that she was showered with as gifts when a baby, and with which we put her to sleep every night since the beginning. Somewhere around month 4 or 5 (did I document it? I don’t know…) we stopped giving her a pacifier at night, because she kept dropping it and getting upset because she couldn’t get it back. To compensate, she started chewing on her blanket, and she kept doing it every night, every naptime, and really whenever she could get her hands on them. We had to set firm rules that she could only have the blankets when it was time to sleep, or she would have dragged them around in her mouth from morning to night! As it happened, that policy meant she was always excited to get to bed or nap, because she got to have the “blankies”…and perhaps also because of that she would usually stay quiet and wait for a long time after waking before making any noise that might cause us to get her up.

Well, as of now the biting blankies are for biting in name only, because she stopped. We had been suggesting to her that as we traveled, we’d have fewer blankies on hand and if they all got dirty—and oh they did, after spending all night in her mouth—she’d have to spend some nights without them. But it wasn’t an intense pressure campaign, just some suggesting.

And psychologically, that she stopped biting the blankies must have removed another mental block for her, because at naptime on November 20th she declared that she wanted to sleep in the “big girl bed”…that is, a real bed and not her pack-and-play. (Good thing, too…she was way too big for the pack-and-play but still wanted to fold up into it.) We had originally thought that the lure of graduating to the big girl bed would be a good incentive, and so we said that she could make the move if she stopped biting her blankies. Wrong move, apparently, because she preferred the biting to the big bed. But once she had stopped biting of her own accord, there must not have been any reason left to stay in the pack-and-play. Two days later, we left town for Thanksgiving and for the first time in three+ years, we did not take a pack and play with us.

So far, so good. She hasn’t fallen out of bed yet (despite several nights on air mattresses and one naptime on a real bed without railings), which we might attribute to her being so old at this point that she doesn’t thrash around too much. In fact, she hasn’t even gotten out of bed yet. She has still been laying awake, sometimes singing, after she wakes up, waiting for us to come get her. We’ll see what the future holds, but for now, what a joy.

So the final tally for climbing out of the pack-and-play or crib is: twice on the pack-and-play (January 1 and 2 of this year), and once from the crib (sometime in the summer of this year, when she had dropped her blankie over the side and frantically tried to retrieve it). I wonder if any other parents have been so lucky. Best. Baby. Ever.