Pacifiers

For the past few weeks we have been telling Emma that we would soon be getting rid of her pacifiers. Prior to moving to Minnesota, we were down to using them for just naps and bedtime. But with our move Emma became a bit more dependent on them at other times. Over the past week or so, we have been working at getting her to scale back down to just using the pacifier as nap time and bedtime again, and we have been pretty successful at that. After mentioning to her teachers that we were going to try to get her to stop using the pacifiers altogether, they asked if they should hold back on giving it to her for her naps at daycare. So at least twice this past week, she did not using one during her nap.

Emma does not have daycare tomorrow because of staff development at the daycare center, so we thought we would use this three-day weekend to get her to quit using the pacifiers, thinking that she would break that habit in a few days and be just fine without it by Monday night. Apparently we were a bit delusional in our thinking. Friday night when Emma asked for her "pasur," as she calls it, we resisted, letting her scream for nearly forty-five minutes. Mel eventually ended up rocking her to sleep. Then around 2:45 in the morning, Emma woke up again. We tried to get her to go back to sleep without her pacifier, but after an hour of screaming Mel decided to let Emma sleep with her on the couch.

So Saturday we gave it another shot. Emma once again kept screaming and screaming when she should have been napping after lunch. This time we relented and gave her a pacifier, however Mel cut off the tip of the pacifier first. One of her coworkers suggested cutting the tip of the pacifier off, and then cutting off a bit more every few days until nothing was left of the pacifier to put in her mouth. So we are going to try this method to gradually wean her from her pacifier. Last night at bedtime, Emma told Mel that her pacifier was broken, and she did not take it as readily as she had in the past. Perhaps this will work. Things did go fairly well last night, although Emma did end up waking up at 4:45 this morning. While that is earlier than she usually wakes up, it is not outside of the span of times in which we would anticipate her waking. I ended up getting her to go back to sleep lying with me on the couch. She ended up falling back to sleep and staying asleep until about 6:15.

Emma napped fine today, but did give us a bit of trouble going to sleep tonight, although I do not think the pacifier was the issue. Once we opened her door a crack to let some light in, she seemed fine.