The little guy has been using the Nuk Genius pacifier since he was a few weeks old.  Originally we didn’t want him to use a pacifier, because we didn’t want to deal with getting him to stop using it later on, and my wife has a real fear of him being one of those 5-year-olds who walks around with a pacifier.  But, after a few weeks of him screaming all the time, this resistance waned.

For me I didn’t really care about it (and still don’t, too much), because I figure if he is an oral guy, he’s going to suck on his thumb or clothing anyway, so why not give him a device for it?  And, as I wrote about previously, I think the pacifier actually does something good for teaching ownership to the little ones of the world.

Anyway, he is now at an age that we think it is good to start removing it during day-to-day interaction, while saving it exclusively for the nights and sleeping.  If we wait too long, it will become a big deal, and when we tried to remove it before, he freaked out.  But now, when we are back in a familiar place, and he has a whole bunch of things to occupy his mind by the way of “new” toys (ones he had but forgot about), this is a perfect time.  In addition, with jetlag, we have a great opportunity to reset this, too.

So, what have we done?  Instead of making a big deal about it, we have simply “forgotten” about it.  In other words, when we would have normally given it to him, we just don’t.  Of course if he whines about it a lot I will give it to him, but in reality, that is becoming less and less already, just in the last 3 days.  Today, for example, he already fell asleep without it during his nap.

There will probably be a regression in this, and if he sees a pacifier he will make a beeline for it, so that probably means stealing them from other kids in playrooms, etc.  But for the moment, the plan is to simply forget about it, like he never had a pacifier in the first place, and save it for nighttime.  We are wishing ourselves good luck in this endeavor! 😉