Soother, dodo, dummy, pacifier, pipe of peace – whatever you, as a parent, choose to call this beloved item they are the best and the worst of baby paraphernalia.
In the hazy newborn days of punishing constant feeding they are the one magical item that can help wrecked new mums get an hour’s sleep. They really are a pipe of peace.
But as baby grows to toddler these beloved items can take over, take on a life of their very own, dictate sleep habits, moods even, and turn your child into a crazed and raving lunatic on a par with a drug addict.
Our youngest boy is 20 months old and will not give up his soother. We have tried everything from tough love to total cold turkey withdrawal but, may God forgive us, we buckled under the pressure of the screaming demon every time and gave the blasted thing back to him.
The child won’t go to sleep without it. He will literally cry for two hours straight (he inherited this difficult streak from his super stubborn father, his cuteness and charm are all me).
Such is his addiction we have to have emergency supplies in the car, in the cupboards at home, in my handbag. I’ve broached the subject with various health visitors and other mums and come away with the view that the boy is sure to grow up to follow a life of crime and drug addiction because of this mummy-induced early introduction to dodo-aholism.
The boy is nearly two. I don’t want him to be one of those 15-year-olds who still sucks a dummy. He needs to grow up and dump it.
We conducted a ‘throwing the dodo in the bin’ ceremony last week where we made a song and dance about bidding farewell to the blasted thing. The screaming you heard last Thursday at 2.14pm was not Concorde breaking the sound barrier, or a banshee with a loud speaker as you may well have thought. It was Finn O’Neill bursting everyone’s eardrums within a three-mile radius because his beloved dodo got trashed.
This high-pitched screaming lasted for the entire journey to the chemist. It continued while we waited in the queue behind a lady who wasn’t concerned about the level seven dodo emergency that was unfolding behind her and insisted on telling the cashier of a recent and quite fascinating trip to the frozen food department at Tescos. The screaming carried on unabated while I ripped the dummy out of the packet, dropped it on the floor, went to the shop next door to buy water to wash it, queued some more and plonked it into the boy’s mouth.
I could hear a universal sigh of relief when that magical, mystical dodo did it’s job and I gave a big ups to Jesus Christ himself for inventing such a wondrous thing.
That joy at him being reunited with his beloved soother lasted until the middle of the night when the boy woke us up enquiring loudly as to if one of us would kindly locate it within the blankets of his cot.
We’ve tried to explain about the dodo fairy – cousin of the tooth fairy, sister of the bobo fairy. This fairy collects dummies from children and exchanges them for cold hard cash or toys. She bags and tags these collected treasures and delivers them to Santa who gives them to the baby reindeers, apparently. But the woman has more chance of gaining unauthorised access into Buckingham Palace than to our house. I fear that if she happens to shimmer in some night to collect the boy’s dodo she may get a black eye or a busted lip for her trouble.
So we’ll keep on trucking with this soother –sometimes a blessing, more times a curse – until someone comes up with an invention to wean them off without all the screaming.
We may have to send him to rehab for dodo-aholics. Perhaps a dodo replacement patch along the same lines as the nicotine patches might work? Now there’s an idea…
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