My child’s withdrawal symptom (from the thumb-sucking addiction) was literally a nightmare. For the subsequent days, she would wake up in the middle of the night and cried and threw tantrum for about 2 hours each night.Imagine the amount of sleep we got. She had screaming fits in the middle of the night, and it was really difficult to find ways to calm her down, without giving in to her request, which was her favorite bolster cover. But we persisted. Every night, we did a count down, and we couldn’t wait for the 14th day since she last suck her thumb to sleep to arrive.
In the midst of all that, she was also angry with the person who supposedly washed her bolster, for not being careful with something so precious. My husband tried to give her another bolster cover, which she refused to use (which was not such a bad thing). After a while, I ran out of stories to tell, but thank God she was ok with the same story (the tortoise and the hare story) that I told her over and over again. Finally, when we reached the (around) 14th day, we were quite confident that she would not suck her thumb to sleep anymore. She started to accept the fact that she is not going to see her bolster cover again, and didn’t mourn for the loss of her bolster cover anymore. She was able to talk about the lost of her bolster cover without getting emotional anymore.
So what happened to the bolster cover? I passed it to the only other person who will be able to keep the secret - my mother, and asked her to keep it in her house (by the way, my mother made that bolster cover for her). This is so that we don’t accidentally find it when we do housekeeping, and I don’t want to go through the thumb-sucking rehabilitation all over again. Till this day, she still doesn’t know that the bolster cover is still around, tucked away somewhere that nobody knows except my mother.
