Crutches

My dad had surgery on his knee a couple weeks ago.  He had a "Knee Resurfacing", in which the orthopod was able to replace the parts of the knee that were worn out.  He used a walker at home during recovery in order to steady himself, just for a few days.  As far as I know, he is able to walk around without aid now, and without too much of a fear of falling.

Spiff's grandmother recently fractured both of her ankles stumbling down the last step of a flight of stairs.  She is in a wheelchair and staying at a skilled nursing facility until she recovers.  She despises being in that chair, and wants desperately to be her mobile, independent little self again.  She has broken some of her rules about moving herself around her room, and has spent some time putting weight on her fragile and broken legs, much to our chagrin.

We are also experimenting with throwing out a crutch.  Gunner just turned 7 months old, and as I have been watching his behavior over the past couple weeks, I realized that he hasn't been very interested in his binkie.  If I give it to him while we're in the car, he will take it, but then almost immediately pull it out and play with it.  If I give it to him to help him go to sleep, he sucks on it for a while, and then promptly spits it out when he is in dreamland.  If we try to give it to him while he's crying and really upset, it only makes him more angry.  I usually find it clutched in one of his little hands, or hidden underneath his crib.

A friend of mine, and mother of a toddler, told me last year that there was a phase when her baby didn't really care for his binkie.  She wished that she would have taken it away then, so that she didn't have to try to take it from him when he was older and more attached to it.  She also mentioned that she kept it because she was attached to it at the time.  I have thought about this quite a bit, and since Gunner doesn't seem to care much for his binkie at this point in his little life, we're testing it out and seeing how we all do without his binkie.

I admit that I have loved his binkie!  I loved how it used to turn him off like a switch when he was tiny.  He has used the MAM brand, which I think look so cute plastered onto his tiny face.  I also love it when he falls asleep sucking on it, and I can hear him sort of snoring as he breathes around it.  We haven't used the binkie for a couple days now, and I can't say that I think he misses it at all.  I miss it, though.  Not so much for its soothing purposes anymore, but because taking it away only reminds me of how quickly my little baby is growing up.

His binkies are still around.  I haven't thrown them out.  If this is too hard on all of us, I'll just get them right back out of the drawer.  But if he never misses them, then I'll just figure this as one battle we won't have to fight later on.