Sucksucksucksucksucksucksuck.
That is the sound of my son.
Last week I wrote about The Creature’s decision to enter himself in the World Screaming Championships (actually, it was about colic, you can find it here).
Empathetic comments were left on the post, and I was pleased to read them. A problem shared may not be a problem halved, but it certainly makes a difference to know that it isn’t just your own child who spends all his waking hours doing an impression of a banshee.
The final comment on that post was from Mum of One, and it was the one which I was probably most glad to read.
Here’s why: Mum of One mentioned the D word. Dummy. Not only mentioned it, but mentioned USING one to soothe her own teeny person.
By the time I read those comments we had already reached that mindset of “will try anything to make this stop”.
While I had been considering seeking out venture capital to start up Cyberdyne Systems, in order to get to work on development of a retrofit volume control for babies, Mrs L had taken the more pragmatic approach of buying a couple of dummies and trying them out. She’s the brains of this operation, of that I have no doubt.
The dummy works. The Creature is now far more likely to be quiet for a bit, to drop off to sleep, to give us some much needed respite from his vocal stylings.
 |
| The Dummy. Or, Peacemaker. |
Hooray. Or so you’d think.
No. We feel awful about using it.
I’m aware that guilt is becoming enough of a theme on this blog that I should probably make it into a separate category, but WOW, parenting is a daily guiltfest. With a guilt party running alongside it, in case you get bored of all the guilt and need some more guilt.
Neither of us know why we feel guilty. We haven’t gone down the route of researching every piece of equipment we subject our boy to. We don’t have medical journals confirming or denying the side effects of dummy use.
We DO have intact eardrums though, which is nice. Meanwhile, Cam doesn’t seem to mind, and he hasn’t been any worse at breastfeeding since using the gobstopper (though that’s not hard, he’s SHITE at that).
So why the niggling feeling that we shouldn’t be doing it? I must confess, the one thing that I know is bothering me is the possibility it could affect his teeth. As the (resentful) owner of a truly stereotypical British smile I would love Cam to have lovely straight teeth. I don’t want Mrs L to have to endure endless days of inconsolable screams to, maybe, improve his chances of perfect pearly whites though.
We’re making as little use of the dummy as we can, it’s only a last resort, but we are going to keep using it for now.
Is it just us and Mum of One who’ve pacified our babies like this? Hit me up in the comments to either make me feel better about our decision, or to pour scorn upon my parenting skills.
