Like most well intentioned first time mothers, I self-righteously
announced to all before the birth of our daughter that “I would not be giving
our baby a dummy”. Apart from problems it could cause with their teeth later
on, and something called “nipple confusion”, I was actually unsure what the
other reasons for not using a dummy were, but from the ‘tiss tissing’ people
seemed to direct towards children using dummies in public, I assumed they must
be bad and therefore would NOT be doing it.
At the 8 week maternal health nurse visit, our health nurse
listened to the long list of techniques my husband and I had fruitlessly employed
in an attempt to get our little daughter to sleep before asking “Have you
considered using a dummy?”
At first I looked at
her like she was speaking a foreign language, “Parles-vous Anglais?” I was
about to ask, had I heard right? “There are the
drawbacks of course”, she said, “Like having to replace the dummy hundreds of
times a night”.
Surely that was an exaggeration, surely whatever ‘dummy
replacing’ that would be needed would be worth it to end to my little baby’s
endless cries… and more importantly to give my husband and I more than an hours
sleep!
Next came the other issue I hadn’t considered in the dummy
‘settling’ technique, “She also may not take a dummy”, she continued. Well that
was something I would definitely be working at overcoming, if we now had the
green light for using a dummy I certainly wouldn’t be giving up that easily. My
Mothers’ group friends seemed to believe the dummy was a godsend and so I too
would join the brigade of first time Mothers before me that had only made it 8
weeks into the job before going back on one of the things they “definitely wouldn’t do”. Thankfully we persevered with the dummy and
she eventually took it (insert wink emoticon here). Luckily she has a suction
on her like a Dyson vacuum cleaner and so replacing the dummy wasn’t a big
issue. This is not true for darling no #2 however.
Upon the impending birth of our son I was quick to announce
to all that “I will be taking a dummy to the hospital”. It was as if announcing
it to all so defiantly left little room for any negative opinions. And even if
this did provoke some disapproving reactions from some no one would dare tell a
fully pregnant woman who was about to have a newborn and a 14 month old at home
to NOT do anything!!
So I did wait some time before trying to give our son,
Master Q, a dummy, but suffice to say he was a regular ‘user’ before he was 2
weeks old! And unfortunately for us he has a suction on him like a TV shopping
network 2-for-1 deal carpet sweeper. We panic if we have set off out of the
house with no back up dummy, and we are on super vigilant dummy watch when someone
else is holding him and there are no other clean ones. Watching the last clean
dummy fall out of his mouth and bounce onto the floor is like watching a
grenade being dropped in slow motion.
Perhaps if we had actually believed that we would in fact be
replacing the dummy hundreds of times a night in an attempt to get some sleep
we wouldn’t have forced Master Q to become so dummy dependent. In fact even
when he wasn’t crying and awake we were still trying to force the dummy upon
him! What were we thinking!?
Maybe if the decision to introduce a dummy was made in calm and
considered moments you would see far less of them around. However as most are
shoved into the mouths of babes in a desperate attempt to save ourselves from
complete mental breakdown we find ourselves slaves to silicon sally, petrified
of the day when we will have to permanently yank it from their mouths and
hoping that day will be before we walk them through the front gates of the
school yard.
And so we continue with the dummy dance on a daily basis;
can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Our daughter, Miss M, who is now
nearly two still has her dummy which is only allowed within the confines of her
cot, OK, well that rule has also been extended to car trips longer than an hour
and day care, and that’s it… I swear!
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