Update, Jan. 16, 2010: The company has contacted me and followed through on their delivery. It seems there was a personnel change that caused the service rift. The business is up and running again.
Update, Jan. 9, 2010: This company has failed to delivery the pacifiers they donated to a charity raffle I held and seems to have gone AWOL — not responding to emails, not tweeting, etc. Please refrain from ordering anything until I can verify they are still in business.
I must admit that I used to be a little biased against pacifiers. It’s probably because my parents didn’t use them for any of us four at all and I didn’t see the need. I mean why give your baby something you need to keep buying and then have to deal with taking it away when they get older. Insofar as the whole soother debate is framed around thumb sucking vs. soother, I always sided with the thumb sucking. It’s free, it’s easy, it’s guaranteed self-soothing and, hey, I used to be a thumb sucker. Besides, soothers look dumb.
Enter kid number one who simply would not stop nursing in the evenings as a newborn and had a guaranteed fussy time every afternoon. My midwife shrugged, some babies are just more sucky than others and your nipples need a break. After three weeks, once breastfeeding has been established, a soother can be a life saver and you can easily take it away once they gain some hand control. Also, the bigger the better to keep them sucking with a wide open breastfeeding mouth. So Colum used a giant, toddler-sized pacifier from three weeks to three months when he started to suck his thumb instead. It worked wonderfully, even if he did look pretty dumb.
I thought I knew what I was doing with Irene and let her suck on my finger until she was three weeks old and then popped a big old soother in her mouth. She spit it right back out. Again. And again. I tried smaller sizes and different shapes and nope, she wasn’t having it. So I kept using my finger and waited until she would be able to use her own hands to soothe herself. I kept trying the pacifier, too. Guess what? She only wanted my finger and was not at all interested in her own. That is how it happened that Irene started using a soother at an age after which Colum had already given his up. She continued to use her soother to sleep until just before her first birthday. But, yeah, it still looked pretty dumb.
When I got this “Sleeping Beauty” pacifier in the mail, though, I had to admit it was pretty cute. Mypacifier.ca does personalized pacifiers that can be imprinted with your baby’s name or any other words you might like. (“Irene Sucks” comes to mind.) There are different styles of soothers to choose from in several different colours. These soothers do not look dumb.
What impressed me the most, however, was the quality. The soother I was sent was light and durable and Irene loved it. Really. She took to it immediately and showed a marked preference for it over the ones she’d been using all along. She liked it so much that I tried to bring her into bed with me one morning to get some extra shut eye and thought she might settle down if I gave her the “Sleeping Beauty” soother. Well, it’s not magic. She chucked it across the room and I heard it slide along the floor, but I have not been able to find it since. Ah, easy come, easy go.
The pacifiers from Mypacifier.ca sell for $19.95 per three-pack which is not bad at all for top quality personalized soothers. If you’re going to be buying them anyway, you might as well get the ones that don’t look so dumb.