Ditching the Pacifier

Nikola uses a pacifier, but only when he’s sleeping (or really sick and miserable). The transition from all the time to just in bed was pretty easy. We gathered up all the pacifiers, put them in the bedroom out of his reach, and told him that pacifiers were only for bed time. Was he sleepy? He can only have one when he’s sleepy. For a while at first he’d sleep with one in his mouth and one in each fist JUST IN CASE but now he just sleeps with the one. We leave them within his reach, and if he gets sleepy he’ll go into the bedroom and get one and walk around sucking on it and being chill. Part of his going-to-sleep ritual involves getting his pacifier. When he’s done sleeping, part of the “I’m really awake” ritual is handing the pacifier to whoever is with him. (or throwing it across the room, if he’s in a pet.)

He’s almost two– he’ll be two in March– and his teeth are really crooked. This isn’t a surprise because my teeth were really crooked, and after over ten years of braces, are still KIND OF crooked. I have very large teeth, a small mouth, and supernumerary teeth. Nesko had braces, too, but only for a year or two. So we were very prepared for Niko to have orthodontic problems. But even with his limited use of the pacifier, I’m starting to worry that the sucking is contributing to his tooth problems.

Then there’s the fact that when he’s asleep and the pacifier falls out of his mouth and he wakes up and it’s gone, he has a hard time resettling himself unless he can find it. Since it’s often tangled up in covers, between the head of the bed and the wall, otherwise hard to get to, what usually happens is he wakes all the way and starts crying and needs help finding the pacifier. This is a sleep disruption for ALL of us (we share a bed), and although we started using the pacifier to help him transition to sleep and learn to self sooth (he was a GREAT sleeper for a LONG time), I think it’s now hindering him from developing good sleep habits.

I was originally going to wait until he was potty trained to dump the pacifier, but he is almost 2 and shows NO interest or inclination where the toilet is concerned.

One of the techniques I’ve heard about involves talking about the pacifier fairy, or giving the pacifiers to babies who need them, etc. I don’t think he’s old enough to understand that, and I don’t think he has the empathy to care about another baby (he is a toddler, after all), unless we talked about a specific baby we know. Then there’s the “trade in the pacifier for an awesome toy” strategy but again, I don’t think he has the brain power for that due to his age.

So. Any suggestions?

What have you done? What have people you know done? What have you read/heard about?

Give my ANY suggestion, no matter how obvious you think it is.

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My Body, Myself

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Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for awhile know that in the past, I’ve grappled with disordered eating. It mostly took the form of binging and fasting (where “fasting” is “going 2-3 days without eating until I’m so hungry I consume the entire world, then freak out about it”) and severe calorie restriction (like, trying to live on 500 calories a day, mostly in the form of diet soda). I’m also really, really fat and it took me a while, but I’ve gotten comfortable in my body. It’s a fat body, but it’s MY body, and (at least until recently) it more or less did what I wanted it to do, when I wanted it to do it.

I used to do a lot of manual labor. I used to dig up (small) trees and haul them around; muck out horse stalls and wheel around overloaded wheelbarrows full of sodden straw and manure; toss around 75 pound bags of flour and sugar; unload trucks full of slate, mulch, compost, etc; work all day in the hot sun.

When I started trying to practice Health At Every Size (HAES) and intuitive eating, my weight stabilized. (I also stopped eating so much dairy, because it makes me ill. It helped me listen to my body more.) I mean, I had a kid 2 years ago, and I had no problems losing all the (minimal) weight I gained while pregnant. I currently weigh the same amount I did before I conceived.

Only I feel fatter than I used to. Like, I feel like I’ve gained 20 pounds or so. My clothes don’t fit well. I feel sluggish and confined. I’m a lot more sedentary than I used to be (this has been a long, cold, wet winter and I don’t have a driver’s license, so going out and doing things and moving is… challenging) and I think I’ve lost muscle and gained fat.

I don’t like my body like this.

So I’ve started working out and holy shit am I out of shape. I used to dance competitively. I used to Irish Step Dance, which means I basically used to jump up and down for an hour or two at a time. I can’t even imagine doing that now. Well, I mean, I can imagine it… and when I put my head down to work out, I’m done far too soon. It’s depressing. I’m still working on it, working out, waiting for the snow to melt and the temperatures to break so I can actually leave the house with the toddler in tow. We can walk a mile to the library, to the park, etc and that’ll help.

But I’ve gotten into some bad food habits as well and I need to correct that. I don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, I’m a sucker for bread (especially with butter), and I could stand to stop eating so much pre-packaged processed food. We have an actual fruit bowl in the dining room, on the table, and having the fresh fruit RIGHT THERE AND VISIBLE is helping us remember to eat it (Niko calls apples and oranges myommyom balls) and I’ve upped my fruit intake quite a bit. I found some great recipes for cauliflower and we’ve been doing a good job of eating more cooked veggies AND more salad (we splurged and got fancy dressings, croûtons, flavored almonds, etc for extra fancy restaurant style salads).

So I’m doing what I can to, in general, improve my body’s health. But the urge is there: to stop eating entirely; to count and reduce calories to almost nothing; to go on a faddish crash diet; to try to win that elusive prize of thinness by any means necessary even if it means shaking hands and dizziness and vertigo and poor health. It’s so sick. There are foods that make me ill (upset stomach, mouth rash, migraine… not all at the same time) and I should keep a food diary so I can track what it is that’s making me sick so I can cut it out of my diet. But I fear that if I start logging food I’ll start restricting again. That way lies madness, and by “madness” I mean “obsession and compulsion and terrible anxiety nightmares.” There are times I wish I could just not eat ever again, never put anything in my mouth again, shed my physical body entirely and just drift away.

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