When I was filling out my birthing plan for the hospital, I haughtily demanded that my newborn not be given a pacifier.  I didn’t want to start any dependence on a foreign object for infant soothing.

I was, in a word, an idiot.

After the third brutal wake-up call from the overnight nurse throwing on the light and clattering cheerfully into my room with my squalling infant in her bassinet, I conceded.  At that point, I didn’t care if they stuck a rutabaga in her mouth.  I just wanted more than two consecutive hours of sleep.

As her first year ended, my daughter seemed to be losing interest in her pacifier.  She was only using it to fall asleep anyway, and once it fell out in the night, she wasn’t freaking out or anything.  But now that she’s in her second year, a surprising and uncomfortable trend has begun: She seems to want it for the majority of her waking hours now.  She absolutely will not let me back out of the driveway without her “car binkie.”  If she hurts herself in any way (real or imagined), she whimpers “I need my binkie, Mama!”  And of course, if she’s tired at all, it is ferreted out from wherever I may have secreted it.

I’m not terribly concerned about it, at this point.  She’s not even two and a half yet.  Although I never had a pacifier, I certainly sucked my thumb until at least first grade.  And based on her genetic recipe, this kid’s gonna need braces no matter what. 

There’s a lot of chatter, both pro and con, about the use of pacifiers.  The Mayo Clinic Website has this to say:

The pros

The cons

Pacifier do's and don'ts

I haven’t experienced any of the “cons” listed above.  She’s never had an ear infection, her teeth look great (so far), and it didn’t seem to affect breastfeeding at all.

I have managed to get her to concede to not using the pacifier in public.  I usually just say “let’s leave the car binkie here so we know where it is,” unless I am foolishly, inconsiderately trying to squeeze out one more errand before her naptime.

Unless she weans herself off it beforehand, I don’t think I’ll start any full-scale Project De-Binkify before she’s at least three years old.  Parenting.com apparently agrees with this plan.  And Parents.com has suggestions when the time is right – that time, by the way, greatly varying depending on child or expert asked.  One is a three-day countdown to rounding them up and getting rid of them; another is a gradual phase-out.  I also know people who have done the “Binkie Fairy” thing, much like the Tooth Fairy, who shows up and takes pacifiers away to babies who need them.

I don’t know what method I’ll use, or when exactly I’ll decide to undertake that project. I think Project De-Diaperfy will take precedence to the former.  But that’s a subject for another blog entry…