A friend wrote a post about her daughter giving up her paci recently, and as I began to respond, I realized it was getting long and was a whole post in itself, so... here it is.
We called a pacifier, what it was - a Plug! It plugged up the crying, etc... To make it sound a bit cutsier, we generally called it a 'pluggie'.
I USED to think that if you offered (forced) a plug, that you would avoid a thumb sucker! I was firmly convinced of this, and the idea that you could always throw away a pacifier, but you couldn't get rid of a thumb!
HA! I had three paci/plug children, and the next sucked a plug till abt. 3 months old she spit it out and found her thumb! That was it! No more paci/plug!
Then I stressed about the thumb... At about 8 months I noticed one day, she just wasn't sucking on it any more! WoW! How did I get SOOOOOO lucky!?!?! Since then, no more paci/plug babies, the next two just weren't ever that interested. it helped in a pinch in the car seat in the car, but otherwise, they didn't really like it as anything other than a not so fun toy.
Bekah was a serious plug baby! By the time she was a todler, she had to have three pluggies at all times! One in her mouth and one for each hand! I thought I'd NEVER get rid of them! When she didn't want to be in her bed, or woke up in the middle of the night, we'd listen as she fussed a bit, but it wasn't until we heard all three pluggies, dropped out of the crib and clattered onto the wood floor, that we knew we would have to go in and retrieve them all to get her setteled down before she'd go back to sleep.
The other Rebekah plug story is: She liked the NUK pacifier. The Orthodontic pacifier. However, she liked it UP-SIDE DOWN!!! We wondered what it was doing to her teeth! (she did have to have braces, but so have each of the next two and I can already see that the others need them as well, so I don't think the upside down orthodinic pacifier caused that). We used to put it in straight/correctly just to watch her flip it over. She would flip it with her tongue, in NO time at all! It was actually pretty amazing. We would do it for friends and probably strangers... it was our fun baby party trick!
We had heard, read that you shouldn't make too many big changes in a young child's life all at one time. We were moving from Germany back to the US, and I wanted to be sure to get out of country (so I didn't get 'left' behind when the Military suddenly decided to give Bill his orders to be at the school he was going to go to, and I'd be too far along to travel over seas...), so Rebeakh and I left just after Thanksgiving. We spent the time with Bill's parents, where Rebekah got lots of grand parent time. Along with moving away from her 'home' and leaving her daddy behind for the time being, she also left behind her crib, and started sleeping in a 'big girl' toddler bed.
Bill arrived back in country a day or two before Christmas. Bill had to report in at the school in AL, just after the New Year. Since we didn't know how long it would take for us to get housing, and we'd be stuck in a small hotel room, we decided to leave Rebekah in VA with her grandparents. We got housing abt. two weeks later, and so the drove her down and were there to help us get moved into our new 'house', on post.
The next BIG thing in her life was the arrival of her new baby sister on the 1st of March. So, she's had a major move, moved out of a crib, and now she had a new baby to contend with as well. How could I even THINK about taking away her pacifier(s)! As mom's (and dad's) of children who are very attached to some sort of comfort item, be it a blankie, a stuffed animal or doll, or a pacifier, you do not ever want to think about being without that item!!! Because she always wanted the three plug's at this point in her life, we kept quite a plethora of 'extra' pluggies on hand. In a somewhat short amount of time we started comming up a little short on extra pluggies. I remember one sad night, with a crying fussing child who we drug out (or made us head out) at nearly midnight to drive to an open all night grocery store to buy a new pluggie, since we couldn't find even ONE anywhere in the house at the moment!!! (they were hidden in the toy box, etc, etc.
Shotly after that, I started noticing that her pluggies were getting holes in them. I figured they were getting old, or something. One day, a few short weeks after Amanda was born, we were visiting a friend. Rebekah came in to show me that her pluggie was "broke". (she was getting molars and had been chewing on them!) I told her to go throw it away. She went to the trash can threw it in and said, "bye, bye"! That was IT!!! she never had another pluggie! It was the last one we knew where it was, and just said, all of them broke, and somehow, this child who had had to have three all the time for nearly a year by that time, never really even asked for another one. Did I get LUCKY or what!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!
