The Long Paci Goodbye

Last week the babies celebrated being ten months old. This has prompted a small but controlled freak-out on my part. Ten months... that's almost a year! And here we are still using bouncy seats and pacifiers! Okay, the bouncy seat usage seriously needs to stop (as evidenced by my little guy breaking one with his 18 pounds of human flesh). The pacifiers are still okay for now, but since pacifiers are supposed to be a thing of the past by one year of age, I know we've got to start weaning off of them now if we're ever going to be ready for such a milestone by twelve months. And so we have begun the Long Paci Goodbye.

My kids love their pacis. Look how happy they are.

Despite every warning I'd read in baby books and heard in my breastfeeding class about not introducing the paci prior to one month of successful breastfeeding, the pacis came out the day after we came home from the hospital. We'd been up all night (and when I say all night, I mean NO SLEEPING) with crying babies who set each other off about every fifteen minutes. Thanks to postpartum hormones, I spent the entire night involuntarily crying even though I was thrilled to have left the hospital with two healthy, though tiny, babies. When the grandmother reinforcements arrived in the morning, I was a mess, and my mother convinced me to try the pacifier. Ta da! Magic.

The paci has been such a frenemy. Helped the babies go to sleep? Yes. Required constant insertion for a few months? Oh yes. We bought clips to have them with us always, for I pity the fool who finds herself without a pacifier in the throes of a grocery store meltdown.

We've had a good run, paci, but your days are numbered. This month we're only using the pacis to fall asleep with. No more casual playtime paci nips. Next month I'll try to segue into using them only if we're having a really hard time falling asleep.

We can do this, right?