The Mommy Life: pacifiers

I was mortified when one of the baby nurses at the hospital gave my older son, Brody, a pacifier when he was two days old! Her reasoning was that ‘he just seems to keep wanting to eat’. Ugh! I NEVER wanted my kid to have a pacifier!! She just so happened to be my cousin, so I gave her a piece of my mind!! I have since apologized for my crazy, hormonal outburst of insanity.

If something similar happens to you, Fret not… that pacifier saved my sanity many, many times. If your baby will take a pacifier, it may keep a lot of the crying down and later on, help with teething. If your baby has colic, the pacifier will be very beneficial to you and baby as well. Jaxen only took a pacifier for a few months. It did not serve its purpose during colic. :-/

So Brody and his pacifier (“Pat” is what he named it) were inseparable. I always had extra pacifiers everywhere!... my purse, diaper bag, every room in the house. Brody also hid them throughout the entire house. “Pat” was a permanent fixture, it was in every picture of my son, he never let it out of his site and his teeth were starting to go crooked. (One of) My worst nightmare! My kid’s teeth are gonna be jacked up and he’s gonna have this crap in his mouth until he’s six years old! AHHHHHH!!!

Here’s what we did with Brody:

We figured 2 years old was the oldest we wanted our kid to be running around with this crap in his mouth… When it was getting close to Brody’s 2^nd birthday, we sat him down and explained that big boys don’t need pacifiers and he was about to be a big boy soon. We just kept saying little things to let him know the time was approaching for him to grow up, be a big boy and get rid of Pat. We made sure not to belittle his attachment or make him feel like he was doing anything wrong. Just hinted around here and there about how babies use pacifiers and he was about to be TWO YEARS OLD! Wouldn’t you know… the night before he turned two years old, after reminding him of his impending birthday, our little dude threw Pat in the trash and exclaimed “I’m a big boy tomorrah!!!” Woohoooo!

All went well with the death of Pat…. Brody did great adjusting to not having it, he really didn’t even ask for it more than a couple of times. He never put it in his mouth again. And his teeth are perfectly straight, I might add.