My Mortal Enemy – The Pacifier

Before I gave birth, everyone told me not to let my daughter have a pacifier. “She’ll be five and running around with it in her mouth.” My kid? Never! I always figured it was easier to get rid of a pacifier than her finger. Well, here we are two years later and that stupid piece of plastic is enemy #1 in my house.

When my daughter was born, she was diagnosed with non-acid reflux. This meant that most of what she ate would come right back up. So we relied on the pacifier to help keep her food down. By sucking on the pacifier, her saliva helped to keep her stomach acids down. For us, that was more important than being worried about how we would deal with taking it away later.

Our original plan was to take it away when she turned 2. She only uses the pacifier when she sleeps. She is not allowed to have it any other time. So that is even more of a reason that we have been so slow to tackle this enemy. My husband and I come up with plans about how to battle this. We know that we will need to do it at a time when we don’t have to work the next day because we have a feeling that a good night’s sleep will not be in the cards.

So there have been many three and four day weekends where we have every intention of taking the pacifier away, but we get derailed for some reason. Either we forget or selfishly want to be able to sleep! Which leads me to believe that neither of us find the pacifier to be that big of a deal. If we did, it would have been gone already. We are pretty strict with our daughter so we usually put the kybosh on anything that we deem inappropriate.

She has already been to the dentist, so we know it isn’t causing any issues for her teeth. The only issue is in my head. I know I’m not going to send her off to kindergarten with a pacifier in her mouth. So why do I care? Do I care because society tells us that our children shouldn’t have an item that comforts them? I’m the last person to really care what others think. So maybe I will just give her a little more time with the thing that comforts her at night. Don’t we all wish that we had something that made us happy and secure?

So for right now, I think I will just let her keep her “nuk” (as it’s called in my household.) In the grand scheme of things, this is just a small issue that I don’t see having an impact on our lives. That is unless I send her off to college with it!