For Sale, Cheap: Very Lightly Used Binky

I have just conducted a pacifier experiment. It failed miserably.

With George, I was pretty militantly anti-pacifier. I figured if he was fussing, he was hungry or needed to be changed or held, and I wasn't going to try to substitute a pacifier for any of those things. Plus, I had seen kids freak out when they dropped their pacifier on the ground, screaming and sobbing while their parents frantically washed (or just wiped, if there was no sink nearby) it off as quickly as they could--I kind of figured, why create a dependency like that? Then there was the matter of weaning them off of it when they hit a certain age, if they hadn't dropped the habit on their own. Plus, I had heard a vague theory that pediatric dentists were opposed to them. Honestly, it just all seemed like a bad idea to me.

The second time around I am, predictably, feeling a bit more relaxed about everything. My kid's nursery is in the bathroom, for crying out loud! (No, we don't make him sleep in there, as I'm sure I've mentioned.) What got me thinking about pacifiers this time was that Ben seems to have some gastrointestinal issues--I don't think it's anything serious, but he gets gassy sometimes and he also spits up a fair amount, at least compared to what George did. When Ben is obviously having gas pains, he often acts like he wants to nurse, even if he's just eaten a very full meal. He'll be all squirmy and fussy and will nurse furiously, only to spit most of it right back up. It seems that he wants the comfort more than the food. So in the interests of saving myself the trouble, I started looking into pacifiers.

The consensus among both my friends and most sources on the internet (see for example, the informative "Pacifiers: They don't suck as much as you thought") was that if used properly, pacifiers can be a perfectly legitimate parenting tool, even for parents who aren't planning on abandoning their baby all day in a playpen.

So off we went to Toys-R-Us, to get some more burp cloths (the 6 or 7 I had saved from when George was a baby just weren't enough for this one) and a "Mam" nuk, which had been recommended in particular for breastfed babies by a friend's pediatrician.

It was with slightly mixed feelings that I popped it into his mouth last night, after he was certainly fully fed but was still fussing a bit. I couldn't help feeling a bit like I was cheating, or taking the easy way out, but I pushed all of that aside.

At first he was happy to be getting something in his mouth, but his look of hopefulness soon turned to one of almost disgust as he realized it wasn't what he was expecting. Still, he didn't spit it out. And after probably about 30 seconds the look of disgust/confusion was gone and he was happily sucking away and drifting off to sleep. Score! I settled in myself for what was sure to be a long stretch of sleep.

Only it wasn't. I awoke to the sounds of his fussing and I saw that the pacifier had fallen out of his mouth. So now I'm thinking, am I creating a dependency here? But I was so sleepy I decided not to care, and put it back in. Same look of confusion and disgust on his part, but followed again very quickly by peaceful sucking and drifting back to sleep.

When I awoke to his fussing a couple of hours later, I figured it was feeding time again... and OW! OW! What did he think I was, a pacifier or something?! Clearly, yes. I soldiered on and finished the feeding, and when he was still fussing after over an hour of it, I went against my best judgment and tried the nuk again, hoping that this little chomping problem was just a fluke.

Well, it wasn't. And the rest of the night was quite miserable (for me, anyway).

So, alas, the great pacifier experiment has failed. Oh well; I did get one really nice two-hour stretch of sleeping--and later, a funny photo op--out of it.