Farewell My Pacifier

Soon...very soon...a small, winged, and completely fictitious person will enter our home in the dark, wee hours of the morning. She is called the Bot Fairy (bot = pacifier, binky, dummy, soother, etc in M-speak) and her sole purpose in her albeit imaginary life is to come to the homes of little boys and girls to relieve them of their bots. She will come bearing gifts--a doll, a book--to sweeten the deal. But frankly, I have doubts that anything short of more bots will make this an easy transition for M and the rest of our family.

The truth is, we should have done this a lot sooner. I suspect it might have been easier to manage. But the distance between when our dentist told us the time had come to give the bot the boot and it becoming a reality has widened significantly.

K and I wanted to do it last year after M turned two. But we had to make a call between transitioning her to a bed vs. removing the bot. And the bed won since we needed the crib for Z. Then after Z was born, we were worried about pushing more changes on her since I think it's safe to say the arrival of a new sibling is one of the biggest changes a young child can go through. So the months passed by. Then we started potty training. Then her third birthday arrived along with the transition to preschool. And with every change, the bot become more and more important to her.

We're not completely screwed. In the midst of last year I managed to impose a new bot rule: the bot shall only be used during sleep and promptly removed if seen in M's mouth during any other time. But the whole preschool thing has proved to be much more challenging for her than I'd imagined which means the bot has once again become a critical part of her naptime and nighttime comfort routine.

When I hear parents who bemoan their child's continued use of a blanky or other comfort item, all I can say is, "I wish." Last I heard, no kid had a serious case of brace face thanks to the effects of a blanky.

Meanwhile, I am spending precious minutes each day worrying about how to make the whole thing as painless as possible. I've been trying to find books about pacifier weaning but most of them look pretty lame. And the only one that seemed to get high ratings is apparently out of print and not available in our library. So I continue to allude to the Bot Fairy visit while looking for the right moment to set things into motion.