Stash

For a long time, I thought pacifiers were like socks and just vanished into the ether periodically. No matter how many pacifiers Edith had in her bed, they would somehow all disappear and I would be stuck hunting for them. We had tons, but there wouldn’t be any in the playroom or the dishwasher or the car or her stroller or the diaper bag.

So I bought more, and then those would vanish.

I did notice that many mornings when I picked Edith up out of her bed and brought her into mine, she scrambled to collect an extra pacifier or sometimes two. She often stuck one in my mouth, so I though this scrambling was on my behalf, that this was a companionable thing, like her showing up for the commute with two cups of coffee.

Then one day I idly looked under my bed, and this is what I saw:

So it turns out that every morning, Edith had been dropping her pacifier (or two or three if she could manage it) down behind the head board. She was scrambling to collect more so that she could have more to drop. And putting one in my mouth was just a practical measure, for conveyance.

So now every Sunday night, I get the broom out and spend some time collecting her week’s cache. As I sweep them out, Edith hovers nearby, grabbing handfuls and attempting to stick all of them into her mouth at once, then dropping those and snatching up the others like a chipmunk storing up nuts for winter.

Meanwhile I am reading a Montessori book that says that children oughtn’t to have pacifiers because it can interfere with speech development, but that it can be ok for them to sleep with one, if it’s kept in a special box next to their floor bed for nighttime only.