about a binky.

Before I had J, I would look at children with pacifiers and think, "not my kid." My father gave us two back in March along with a tube of Desitin and a small bottle of whiskey. "You don't think you'll need these, but you will." I asked him what the whiskey was for and he said, "Pour two fingers worth into a glass. Rub some on the baby's gums when he's teething and keep the rest for yourself."

After J was born, it became immediately apparent that he loved to suck. The doctor calls what he likes "finger juice" -- a (hopefully clean) adult finger placed print-up in the baby's mouth, fingertip on his soft palette. J will greedily suck away, actually lifting his head up with sucking power if you try to pull your finger back. We take hand-washing a lot more seriously these days.

When we got home from the hospital, freshly circumcised baby in hand, we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves. He was obviously in a lot of distress, but it isn't easy to keep a finger in a baby's mouth while you're inevitably drifting off to sleep yourself. So in desperation, Marc broke down first and decided to open the package of pacifiers from my father and boil them (the pacifiers need to be "sterilized" before they can be sucked on and then dropped on the floor repeatedly). He took this picture of boiling binkies to show my parents just how long we were able to hold out.

But much to our dismay, pacifiers are not the magical finger substitutes we hoped they would be. J can usually keep one in his mouth for about thirty seconds, if even that long. When they come out, his weird sucking pattern makes them actually pop out with some velocity -- they aren't just lazily dropping away, unless he's fallen asleep (not likely). We've tried four different brands to date, and nothing seems to do the trick as well as our fingers. (And fingers don't do the trick as well as a boob, but that's another story and would probably help explain the fact that at his one month appointment J weighed in at 13 lb. 3 oz.)

So much for sacrificing my disdain for the binky -- it hurts to give up such high moral ground for nothing, and I get the feeling there are many more humbling parenting lessons to come.