Suckers

The mantra of lactation consultants is that one must avoid nipple confusion at all costs, at least in the case of newborns. This means that the introduction of bottles, pacifiers and any other objects other than the mother’s breast designed to be placed in your child’s mouth to stop them from crying are strongly frowned upon. No one really says what the repercussions of being nipple confused is, but the implication is no good and will invariably involve some sort of therapy in adulthood.

Now we really want Owen to have nipple clarity and had decided that we would not introduce a pacifier for at least one month and delay introducing a bottle until sometime after that, but then came his third night home from the hospital. For reasons that still elude us, Owen decided that the hours between midnight and four in the morning should be spent either breast feeding or screaming. We tried walking. We tried swaddling. We tried rocking. We tried singing. We tried various combinations of all of these and nothing seemed to help. Finally, at 3:30 am Elaine decided to go boil a pacifier. Allen wanted to hold off and desperately searched on-line for some alternative remedy, but by the time Elaine returned with the sterilized pacifier Allen had given up and offered the forbidden fruit to our son.

Which he summarily and immediately rejected.

To be honest, we hadn’t considered that as a possible outcome. The pacifier was our nuclear option which would insure peace but may also involve quite a bit of fallout. Having weighed the pros and cons and decided to go for it, we just assumed it would work. As our son spit it out and continued to wail and scream we just looked at each other, horrified, and contemplating what to do next.

Eventually, Owen fell asleep and we got a few hours as well. The next day we wondered about our folly and what it said about us as parents that we had caved so quickly and to no purpose. Allen called his friend Nabeel who has a 1 ½ year old and asked his opinion about pacifiers. While Nabeel maintained they held out for three weeks (though his wife Megan called the next day and corrected him that the initial introduction was more like five days) their philosophy was that given you can’t boil their fingers, a sterilized pacifier isn’t the worst thing in the world.