Pacifier Paradise
By Tiffany Lewis

The two most valued commodities in our house these days are sleep and pacifiers, because we seem to lose a lot of both.

We go through pacifiers like disposable diapers and infant tube socks.  Brand-new, nautical-themed, silicon-tipped, fresh-out-of-the-package one minute, gone the next.  I’m convinced the crib swallows them whole.  Once in a while I’ll pull out the mattress and find an entire graveyard of crusty, dusty pacifiers.

We lose a lot of things in this house, but the loss of a pacifier is a serious matter. 

Two-fifths of our family is pacifier dependent, and when the pacifier reservoir runs dry we all feel the ramifications.  There is weeping, wailing, and gnashing of itty-bitty baby teeth.  We call in reinforcements for an all-out hunt: on countertops, under couches, hidden in the folds of blankets.  I have had numerous pacifier prayers answered.

There was a night I will never forget when I was alone with three children and ONLY ONE PACIFIER.  I kept running back and forth between cribs, carrying the precious piece of plastic and sticking it in whatever orifice happened to be crying at the moment.

My infant is so pacifier dependent he learned how to stick it back in his mouth at six months.  His sole motivation for learning to crawl was to retrieve the pacifier that got kicked across the room.

My 2 ½ -year-old is also pacifier dependent, a fact that was met with a severe frown at our last doctor’s appointment.  (Like we mothers need another reason to feel like The Worst Parent In The World.)  But the weaning thing is tricky.  The American Academy of Pediatrics now says children should have a pacifier, but not right at first, because that will lead to nipple confusion, and not after the first year, or you’ll be living with bucked-tooth beaver.  This leaves a small margin of time for babies to love it and leave it.

We have given the weaning thing a valiant effort.  We have, at various times, lost it, hid it, cut it, or confiscated it.  At the suggestion of a cousin, I almost left a plate of NUKs for Santa Claus, but began to imagine the Christmas-morning trauma that might result from Rudolph and the gang stealing away in the night with my kid’s pacifiers.

The truth is, I’m the one who needs to be weaned, weaned from the convenience that comes with the pacifier.  My son takes really great naps and is our best sleeper: He will beg to go to bed because he values his sleep, but also because he knows that blessed pacifier, like an old friend, is waiting for him, nestled among the blankets.  It’s also invaluable on long car trips, during sickness, on the airplane and in sacrament meeting. Plug ‘em up and keep ‘em quiet.

But I still have options: Easter is coming up, and I don’t feel much of a need to have my kids emotionally attached to the Easter Bunny.  And if that doesn’t work, there’s the Fourth of July.  We could take the entire ancestral line of pacifiers, set them on fire, and send them across the water like a hundred Japanese lanterns. 

It would be magnificent.  And only a bit traumatizing.