I love my little bambina… even though she insists on carrying around a smelly, discolored, threadbare piece of cloth that she calls a bib, wherever she goes.
She also sucks her thumb… something she’s been doing since the time she was born. She’d grab the bib with her left hand and start sucking her right thumb. Always the right thumb. And always with the bib in the other hand.
Back then, I could wash the bib whenever it got dirty. When she was about a year old, she began to differentiate between the clean and dirty bibs by smell, and started refusing to let it be washed.
Each time she reached out for it she’d smell it first. If it ‘smelled’ clean, she’d actually ask for the dirty one. She now has a big red boo-boo on her right thumb caused by her thumb-sucking habit.
A couple of months ago, she asked me to ‘bannage’ her thumb (she probably bit down on it too hard!). So I did, curious to see what would happen when she decided she needed to suck it.
When the time came, she asked me to remove the bandage. I politely refused, saying she needed to keep it on overnight. She looked at me, then looked at the thumb, tried putting it in her mouth, didn’t like sucking on the bandage very much, and so popped her left thumb in her mouth.
She pulled a couple of faces, maybe the left thumb didn’t taste as good as the right, but she didn’t have a choice, so that was that.
Now, when she feels the urge coming on, she doesn’t hesitate to say, “Tana, give me my bib so I can suck my thumb!”
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