Comfort Me

When Johnny was a baby, he very briefly took a pacifier, then switched to sucking his thumb. I was happy he made the switch on his own, and unlike many parents, was not at all perturbed that he was sucking his thumb. After all, a thumb can't fall on the floor or get lost. He stopped the thumb sucking on his own too, and around a year, I began searching for something else to be his comfort object. Many parenting "experts" encourage introducing a "lovey" because children need to learn to soothe themselves, a skill that mom and dad will certainly appreciate in the wee hours of the morning.

His favorite toy turned out to be a stuffed caterpillar that my mom bought from a catalog when I was 16. She thought it was cute and unique, so she got it for her future grandchild and it lived in her closet for ten years until Johnny was born. After a few years of love and abuse by Johnny, it's starting to look a little ragged. It's antennae are limp, there is a hole in one of the segments, a eye is missing, and the fuzz on the rear end is a little thin. He doesn't pay any attention to it so long as it is there when he goes to bed. If it's missing, he asks for it and we have to tear apart the room to find it.

Maureen, on the other hand, has always been very attached to her pacifier. In the past couple of months, we've lost a couple and John's uncle's dog chewed on another. Since she's over a year now, I figured it was time to start thinking about weaning her from the paci and introducing something else, preferably something that can be easily replaced should she lose it or destroy it. Also, I took her crib bumpers off last week because a certain wild three-year-old has been climbing in and out of the crib, despite repeated admonitions and time outs. I sewed four ties back on, and then decided I was tired of it, and that if it couldn't be tied tightly, the bumpers were not safe. While it's much easier to change the sheet with the bumpers gone, the crib looks uncannily like a cage, and it's much easier for all those pacifiers to fall on the floor in the course of the night. So the new comfort object needs to be something large enough to not fit through the bars.

So far, I'm letting her have the pacifier at naptime and bedtime, but also chose a couple of small, soft toys to accompany her to dream land. One is a pink, soft bodied baby doll with crinkly arms, and the other is a Lullaby Gloworm with batteries that are in the process of dying. It lights up, but the music only plays for about ten seconds before it quits. She hasn't shown any sort of attachment to either toy yet, but it hasn't been very long either. Plus, she learned how to climb stairs on New Year's Eve and has been pretty tired out from attempting to escape my eagle eye and get up our stairs. Either way, the pacifier is on it's way out.