Recently, I was noticing that the baby has been fussy, and I felt it was directly tied to his pacifier use. To share with you my position on pacifiers, here it is! We use the pacifier from about 1 month until 5- 6 months, usually, when they begin solids. Or at least three babies used them for about that long. One used it for 12 weeks, another four months, and the longest was for 9 months. The only one who didn’t have a pacifier was my oldest, because I was adamantly against them. He ended up sucking his thumb for years. Now you know why I changed my position on pacifiers for the next babies. 🙂
Anyway, back to the fussiness. The reason for using a pacifier is to help a baby, but at a certain point, I’ve found it becomes self-defeating. When a baby gets used to having it in their mouth so often that they cry when it’s not in, then in my opinion, it’s time to break the habit because they’re more unhappy than they should be, and so is the parent. The pacifier isn’t helping much in that situation. And because we have some people in the house, and particularly visitors, who feel a need to push the pacifier in every time the baby makes a sound, he’s gotten more used to it than I would have liked. So last week I pulled the plug. When we drop the pacifier, we go cold turkey, and since we do it at such a young age, it usually only takes three days until they’ve totally forgotten that they ever had it.
So I resigned myself to three days of crankiness. It was a pleasant surprise when he started sleeping longer in the daytime and nighttime (probably because he didn’t wake up when he realized the pacifier had fallen out :)). And he got so much cuter! Really – when he was happier, he was really happy. You know those huge smiles and beaming faces that make you feel like he really knows who you are and loves you? I just love it! And when he wasn’t happy, we were able to pretty quickly figure out what was causing instead of pushing a plug in (for example, if he was tired, put him to sleep). Not being able to use the pacifier forced us to be more in tune with what he really needed.
But – I have to be honest and say that this past week has been a tough one. In the back of my mind I was kind of wondering why he wasn’t as happy as he was the first few days off the pacifier. That is, until yesterday one of my kids looked at the baby and saw the tiniest bit of a tooth coming through his gum. If you’ve had a teething baby, you know that they aren’t much fun. Lots of crying, and there isn’t much that seems to help for long. Around here, I’ve been doing lots of baby holding and not much else except for basically keeping my house functioning. Which I shouldn’t minimize, because that’s a really big job that I don’t give myself enough appreciation for. But that’s another topic….
Avivah
I’m continually amazed, almost every time I read about how we handle our children, at how similar we are! I have the same “philosophy” about pacifiers, coming from the same experience – my oldest sucking her thumb for years. I never had a baby be interested in it for more than a month, though, and that was probably a teething thing. My fifth child, though, began sucking her thumb at a late age – almost a year old. I was glad that it took very little encouragement to get her to stop about a year and half later.
The one area where we consistently differ, at least on the surface, is our homeschooling methods, since I am very structured in my approach. My husband was never comfortable with a relaxed method, and strangely enough, most of my children have loved workbooks! I feel, though, that the heart of our “methods” are still similar, since it is all based in relationship, example, preparation for what G-d has planned for their lives, and getting a true education.
Janet, I’ve been meaning to post an update on this topic since with baby no. 9, I decided not to give him a pacifier at all! And it’s worked out great. I realized that the way I raised my oldest and this baby are so different that I had to stop assuming what he did (with a mother who went back to work when he was 7 weeks old) and what this baby will do regarding thumb sucking will probably be different.
Isn’t it interesting how people who’ve never met could have so many similarities? That’s a nice thing about how the internet connects people who might not otherwise ‘meet’.
As far as the structured aspect of homeschooling, I have a pretty defined underlying structure to our homeschooling, which allows for me to be relaxed. That probably sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?!