Peace in our Time

Pacifiers are a mixed blessing, I think.

Baby has only just taken to them. Previously, she's spit them out with a look of sheer disgust, one that said 'what do you take me for, that's clearly not a nipple you morons.' Over the last week, she's decided that there is one in her collection that is acceptable. It's a small white half-moon one, with a hippy peace sign on the back. And then from acceptable, it's quickly become a favourite friend.

This is partly great, because it means she'll happily lie on her back for hours, gazing idyllically at the ceiling and munching away on nothing. We can sleep during this time, and it's also helping space out her meals a bit. Instead of immediately resorting to bottles whenever she makes the combination of pouting and grunting that indicates food, we can fob her off with the dummy for a bit.

There it is, though, that 'fob her off'. That's what sticks in my craw a bit. I'm lying to my daughter! Fooling her into chewing on petrochemical rubber. It's going to deform her palate and give her crooked hillbilly teeth and anxiety disorders when she's older and aaaa I'm a bad dad again, aren't I?

That's just paranoia, though, I'm getting used to ignoring that voice in my head. Or entire side of my brain, as the case may be. Harder to get round is the other downside to the pacifier.

It's this - when she loses it or spits it out, she now throws an instant yelling fit. Now, okay, we're gaining sleep overnight by using it. Previously, a yelling fit meant one of us getting up and walking her around or sitting with her on the sofa for a bit until she settled. Now it means staggering to the cot, replacing the lost precious and then collapsing back. Easier, right?

Not when you do it every ten minutes for two hours, I would say. The classic game of Daddy Pick It Up has already begun in earnest.

I was so tired this morning that I couldn't remember the Swedish word for pacifier. I had to go and get my dictionary, my little blue and black Norstedts Fickordbok, to look it up. I leafed through, going from 'do' and overshooting into 'dur' words, running my finger down the page until I found the entry.

But the weird thing was, there was no Swedish definition of the word. There was just a word that looked a bit like 'dnning', but wasn't even clearly in English letters. Phonetics, maybe? Scanning the page, I discovered that all the other words there had the same incomprehensible definitions. This was quite disturbing. I couldn't read any more. My brain was fractured, I'd sprained it by not sleeping enough.

Then I worked out that I was still in bed, too tired to actually fetch the dictionary and just dreaming that I'd done so. And then Freja dislodged her pacifier and started yelling again, and I had to get up.