Paci Scandal 2010

When Elise was a new baby I took her to one of her wellness appointments.  In the exam room, the pediatrician and I had discussed whatever questions I had and how she was progressing.  Somehow the paci was mentioned.

"We'll throw all of the paci's away at 6 months, ok?  I don't like seeing kiddos at church walking and talking and still having binkies."

"uh......mkay." I agreed.  Well sort of.  Seemed like it would be easy enough, in theory.  Especially since we don't go to church.  Maybe then she could keep them longer?

Well, six months came around.  Jason and I discussed taking the paci's away from her, but we wondered "how in the world will that child ever sleep if she doesn't have her paci in her mouth?" Following that thought came "How in the world will we ever get any sleep if she doesn't sleep?"

So, here we are 7 months later.  She still has her paci.  If that's not bad enough I even had to break down and buy another package of them after losing a couple.

I feel like I'm enabling an addict.

Now every time we go to the doctor's office, I get Elise out of her car seat and say "Okay Elise, we're going to leave the paci in the truck because remember, we don't want Dr. Walsh to know that you still have it.  I promise when we get back out here you can have it back."  I then have to remove it from her mouth or her tiny little fingers.

And I continue on as if she's completely rationalizing with me... "we were supposed to take it away from you when you were six months old, then we were only going to let you have it at night, so you should consider yourself lucky......"

Because I feel like I'm cheating on my pediatrician by continuing to enable my child, a couple of appointments ago I blurted out "She still has her paci!!!!!" And then I kind of winced like I was about to get scolded, but I also felt a sense of relief because I was admitting it.  Isn't that like the 1st step of the recovery process?  Admitting the problem? 

Surprisingly, her doctor didn't lecture me about how I'm going to screw up her teeth or speech by continuing with the paci, but she did make it clear that it's only going to become harder and harder to take it away from her as she gets older and more aware of it.

So, I'm still caught up in this scandal where I tell Elise we can't let her doctor see that she has the paci.  If it gets really hard to take them away, I think I'm going to box them all up and IF Elise is old enough to understand (and we haven't gotten rid of them yet) we are going to take them all to her doctor to 'give to all the new babies that need paci's'. 

In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out who the real addict is in the situation.  Elise or Me?