Parenting is a lot of trial and error and learning as you go along. I think Jeff and I have been pretty successful in rolling with the parenting challenges over the last year. This newest challenge - the pacifier situation - really has me at a loss on what to do. Simon has started chewing through his binkies and at an alarmingly fast rate. Case in point - I bought some binkies on Monday night when we first tried to get rid of them. Today is Wednesday and they already have punctures in the sides of them. THAT'S 2 DAYS! He's literally biting the tips off them. Jeff made an interesting point in his recent post that with Simon's early teething (got his first teeth at 3 months), he used his pacifiers as teethers more than something to suck on. Hence the dilemma - all my research on how to break the paci habit all deal with a child who sucks on them.
Simon only uses them in his crib, so it's not a point of weaning him slowly. He's clearly not ready to give them up completely, so we thought that maybe we could switch brands to the soothie style which would be a bit more durable. It's apparent that Simon wanted nothing to do with plan A. I figured that only left plan B - going cold turkey. Well, plan B isn't going so well either. Tried it for nap today and 2 hours of hysterical crying and I had to cave and give him a binky. Simon's been known to get himself so worked up that he throws up and I just couldn't let him get to that point. I then made a call to Jeff telling him to make a target run and stock up on pacifiers. He brought home 4 packs - that's 8 pacifiers. Given his chew rate of 4 days to destroy them that buys us about 2 weeks to come up with plan C. Or keep spending a ton of money on pacifiers every few days.