Dummies...

As far as I am concerned this is another of those "must-do" topics if you have a parenting blog of any description.  Unfortunately it is difficult to do such a topic without sounding like you are better than everyone else (in my opinion) and so in case I inadvertently come across that way, please know that I very much do NOT consider myself better than anyone else, in fact, normally quite the opposite.

Before Naomi was born, when we didn't know whether she was a boy or a girl and when we still called her Allsort, hubby and I discussed dummies and decided that we weren't 100% keen on the idea but that it did feel like it might save our sanity somehow.  So we went out and bought two dummies, just in case they might help.

When Naomi was born we didn't put it in her mouth, we put my boob in her mouth and then I went up to the ward and she cried and she cried and she cried.  I fed her.  She cried.  I changed her. She cried. I burped her.  She cried.  I cuddled her.  She cried.  The ward staff changed her, burped her and cuddled her and yet she cried and cried and cried some more!

The midwives asked me if I had a dummy and I did, so we tried to put it in her mouth.  She cried, if anything louder than she had before.  We gave up on the dummy idea and just dealt with her crying.

Thankfully, the crying was short lived (not that it felt that way at the time) and after only one or two days she became one of the most content babies I have ever met (though when she does cry she does it loud, I think she likes to make up for all the quiet time!) so the dummy kind of got forgot about.

Then it got hard to put her down to sleep, it was taking hours (literally) each night to get her to settle and hubby and I were slowly but surely losing our sanity!  So out came the dummies again.  We got into a routine whereby you could rock her to sleep and put her down, then if she woke up you put the dummy in her mouth and it would help her go off again.

For quite a few weeks this did result in, what was affectionately known as, the dummy run.  That slightly annoying part of the evening where she was asleep but where she cried when the dummy fell out and you would have to run back up the stairs and re-plug her!  Because of this I was quite pleased when this phase ended and she kind of gave up on the dummy herself.  It did mean it was harder to put her down in the first place, but at least once she was down you could walk away and know she would be alright for a few hours.

Then it seemed she wanted the dummy back again, so for the past several weeks we have put her down and if she has woken put the dummy in her mouth which has helped sleep come back. It normally fell out after about two minutes and she didn't care which seemed ideal!

Now though, we seemed to have entered a new phase, one which I am finding more than a little frustrating.  Now she seems to expect the dummy when you lay her down, her wee mouth opens in expectation, however, when you put it in her wee hand comes up and pulls it out of her mouth.  That would be okay but she does not yet possess the manual dexterity to replace the dummy so begins to cry because the dummy isn't in her mouth, all this despite her being the reason it is no longer there!  This phenomenon resulted in me being awake for 60 minutes in the middle of the night, she didn't need fed and fell asleep almost instantly when I rocked her, but then would wake up when she pulled her own dummy out her own mouth.  Roll on the next phase!