the underwear drawer

pacifist

Cal never had pacifiers. Never got into them. He could take the bottle, and would breast-feed like a fiend, but anytime I tried to give him a pacifier, her would just stick his tongue out and the thing would go rolling plip-plip-plip on the floor. So eventually I counted this as good luck (who wants to get their kid attached to something that they're eventually going to have to take away anyway?), and when we were expecting Mack, pacifiers were not anything near my radar of Things To Get For The Baby.

I think you know where this is going.



Earlier this week, I got these Soothies, for no other reason than they were the kind of pacifier we used in the NICU and in the Well-Baby Nursery when I was a Peds resident, so something about having that implicit endorsement of the hospital made me feel good. (She said, writing a note with her Zantac pen on her Advair scratch pad while taking a sip of coffee from her Viagra coffee mug. Ah, we are pawns!) I also seem to remember that the ones they had in the NICU were vanilla-scented for some reason, which I found disgusting, but the nurses insisted that the babies liked. Well, I guess I never heard any of them complain that they didn't like vanilla, anyway.

So on a hunch, after watching Mack endlessly rooting around after just finishing Breakfast #3 (following Breakfast #2 and #1--this kid eats like an anesthesiologist) I ran to CVS and got him a pack of those pacifiers. After a few test sucks, he took to that thing like...well, like someone with a suck reflex, I guess. And then he got all blissed out and his eyes got all heavy and five minutes later, he was asleep. And I was like, oh, so THAT'S why people give kids pacifiers. Only after he fell asleep, the pacifier fell out of his mouth and rolled on the floor into a pile of dog hair, and when Mack woke up a short time later, rooting around for the thing, he was displeased.

So I took the Soothie and safety-pinned it to a rolled up dishrag. That way, I figured it would at least stay put even if he spit it out, and there was enough material for him to sort of grab at and hold in place. Though I don't love the safety pin part of it, it seems to work well, and while inelegant, it seems to have been an ingenious solution.

So ingenious, someone already patented it.




Which begs the question: where was I ten years ago (or whenever) so I could have beat these guys to the punch? And how come their dishrags are so adorable?