Pacifier Addiction Withdrawals - Day 1

Let me just give you a quick overview as to how I got to this point in my life.  Princess Joy is our 5th child.  She was preceeded by her sister who was a VERY difficult baby.  She cried 16 - 20 hours a day for the first year of her life.  This made for 2 very weary parents.  So, when Princess Joy entered the world, with some very similar traits, it was very difficult.  The icing on the cake was that her screaming literally hurt our ears.  If she started while we were holding her it felt like she was damaging our hearing.  You know, the kind that it movies they show it breaking glass.  She never broke any glass, but we didn't doubt that she could if given the opportunity.  Not sure if it was the pitch of the cry or what, but we couldn't deal with it.  So, we gave her a pacifier.

We soon discovered that it saved our eardrums, so we gave it to her whenever she would cry or scream.  Well, in the past two years, we've had times where we've tried to break her of it, but she would get an ear infection, cold, etc. The crying would begin, and to save our hearing, we'd put it back in her mouth.

Now we have a two year old, who wants this thing in her mouth 24 hours a day.  She cries for it all the time, and the pitch of her cry is no better than it was two years ago. Her world came to an abrupt halt, the other morning, when she lost it! The girls and I searched the entire house for it, to no avail.  Six hours later, when my son got home from school, she was still crying for it.  His finding skills are amazing, and anytime the girls are missing something he can find it for them. When he couldn't find it, I decided to suck it up and break her of it once and for all (after all she is 2 now). I was not driving 1/2 hour to the store to buy her a new one!

Bedtime came with a total of approx. 11 hours of crying/whining and me only pulling out a few hundred of my hairs throughout the day :).  Then, as I was putting the kids in bed, I remembered I had a spare hiding!  I quickly told myself  'NO! You made it through the first day. Just keep going.'  But, to be totally honest, I felt a wave of compassion come over me.  How hard this must be for her.  She's had this thing all day, every day, for 2 years.  So, I told my hubby I was going to give her the spare BUT only at naptime & bedtime.  He laughed thinking I'd cave, but I knew I needed to stick to my guns.  So, I gave it to her and told her she could only have it for bed, and then she had to give it to me the next morning. You should have seen the look on her face when I gave it to her.  She was so excited!

(This is not a pic of her happy to have it back, just one with it hanging out of her mouth)

  We started calling her pacifier the *blah*. When she was little she tried to say 'Pa' for short but it always came out blah. So that's what everyone in this house calls it. :)