It's funny how good you can feel about both the small and the big achievements.

Just a couple of mornings ago, I wrote a post about the dangerous legislation proposing to redefine "rape" in the Hyde Amendment to "forcible rape".

I was one of millions of bloggers, tweeters, and other utilizers of social media to speak out against this issue. And, behold! The power of the people (with a hi-speed connection)!

The new wording of the bill has already been recanted. Props to everyone who called or wrote their congressperson to protest the rewording of the bill; your voice was heard. As much as we love to criticize the internet, isn't it cool how well it serves to spread information and opinion?

Though nowhere near as important or serious, my family achieved something else yesterday about which I'm very proud. I've mentioned before how much I dislike my 18-month-old's use of the pacifier. After a lot of inner debate, Mommy decided yesterday that if my big boy could sit through an entire movie at the cinema, he certainly could sleep through the night without a pacifier.

I called his Daddy and we hatched a plan. Instead of picking him up from preschool right after work (as he usually does), my husband would go home and round up all the "passies". When I got home a little bit later, I would quickly change, we would wrap the pacifiers up in pretty blue plastic, so they looked like a mini-gift basket. We both would go to pick my son up together, and hand him the wrapped bundle of passies (the clear plastic enabled him to understand what was in the bundle). We would then tell him we were taking him to the store to pick out a new toy, and he could trade in his pacifiers for the toy.

This part of the plan went through without a hitch. (Though, when we went to pick him up, he had been bitten by another kid in his class again. Those little girls just can't keep their teeth out of my boy.) We got to Target, and while my husband took our son off to look at toys, I explained the situation to the cashier, a very sweet woman who was more than happy to play along. I thanked her, and caught up with my boys in the toy section.

This is where things went a little downhill. My beloved little son wanted nothing more than the $60 Leapfrog handheld computer toy that was WAY too old for him. (He just wanted it because it played music.) I finally managed to drag him over to the aisle with the more age-appropriate toys, where we found an awesome little microphone that played music and on which you could record and play messages. (He and his older cousin love playing on the karaoke machine at his grandparents', so it seemed perfect.) We gave him the microphone and the bag of passies to carry, and marched up to the register.

We had him place the microphone on the conveyor, and the cashier leaned over and very professionally asked, "Do you have some pacifiers to give me?" He handed over the bundle without a thought, and she scanned and handed back his microphone (which Daddy immediately took out of the packaging so my son could play with it). They headed to the car while I snuck the passies into my coat pocket and paid the cashier.

And last night, my son went to sleep just as easily as he would any other night. I think the act of him giving the passies away himself made it concrete for him that the passies were gone and he couldn't use them anymore. Plus, he loves dancing along with his new microphone toy. And Mommy learned an important lesson about the effectiveness of bribery.