The Pacifiers

My children had pacifiers when they were smaller.   You're given pacifiers at the hospital and you see them in babies mouths all around and even though you think you're not going to resort to them, you do.    You cave.   Your ears rebel and you find the pacifier and you stick it in the little wailing mouth and then there is silence...blissful silence.

How much do you give in to the pacifier solution though?   It works well.   It works too well.   It works so well that it's easier to give your older, now small child the pacifier than deal with the complaining and screaming and not sleeping and oh yes, still crying, child.    So you set boundaries and rules.   Pacifiers can be used in the car and in the bed during naps and night time.   Nowhere else.  Or wait, okay, the stroller too.    And there's one in your diaper bag in the case of an emergency.   (Trust me, there will be an emergency.)

Which type do you use?   Do you use the ones they gave you in the hospital because if they gave them to you there, then they must be the best.    But are those bad for tooth development?  Are you cursing your child with bad, buck teeth simply from selecting the wrong pacifier?   You'd better go buy one of every kind.   Then, because babies are master manipulators, you try them all and let your child use the one they like the best, regardless of the merits of that brand or design.    Don't forget to buy twelve or twenty of them though and stick them everywhere, just in case you lose one.

Then there is the weaning.   That's fun because your child is old enough to disagree with you and do so in the most annoying of ways.   They're also smart enough and mobile enough to find where you've hidden them.   They haven't been thrown away—oh no—because there is sure to be one of those, "emergency situations" in which you really, really need to get to sleep and you don't feel like another sleepless night of a pacifier-less child trying and failing to sleep.

Eventually, all the pacifiers are gone and the children don't need them at all any more.   At this point you look at their little teeth and say, "doesn't look like they came in too crooked."  You then pat yourself on the back because by implementing, "operation pacification" (you made up this term, by the way,) you singlehandedly prevented the terrible outcome of a child who sucks their thumb.    Removing the thumb is a lot more involved than throwing away some worn-out pacifiers.

In our case, it wasn't that extreme.   Well, okay, some days it felt like it was.    Overall, our children were mostly easy.  Yes, they liked their pacifiers, but we kept it reasonable.   They weren't thrilled at having them removed, but they adapted fairly quickly.    As we pulled back on pacifier use, I put the pacifiers in a bag in their closet.    When they were done I forgot about the bag.    That is, until today when my children found it.  

They were ecstatic.   They remembered their pacifiers, although they could enunciate better now so they asked me how to say the word and then they tried out saying, "pacifier."   Then they ran back upstairs with the baby dolls and a bag full of pacifiers they were excited about but didn't really want to use anymore.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has taken to calling his father, "dada" suddenly.   He's been calling him, "daddy" all along.    Both names are still used, but we're not sure where the preference of dada came from.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  When my children found the pacifier stash today, my daughter was very excited.   She showed them to me and held them and looked like she was holding a huge bag of candy she was so excited.    Tonight when I was getting their beds ready for sleep (removing trucks, books, legos, etc.) I found not one, but six pacifiers in the crack between the wall and the edge of her mattress.   This is an entirely different bed, but when she was in her crib, she used to hide her extra pacifiers in the same place.   I felt a little bad, taking away all her cleverly hidden treasures.