Snips and Snails and Puppydog Tails

Sam is a pacifier baby. Some babies are naturally not paci-babies, and that’s fantastic. I don’t want to get into the debate of pacifier vs. non-pacifier. What works for your tot probably won’t work for anyone else’s, and if you are one of those lucky parents whose child is never inconsolable, well, two things: 1) count yourself lucky, and 2) don’t ever speak to me because I’ll know that you are lying–no child is never inconsolable. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, Sam is a pacifier baby. When he’s mad, scared, or sleepy, that paci is a wonderful, wonderful thing. When he doesn’t need it, he spits it out with a velocity that’s often quite amusing. The problem comes when he DOES need it, but spits it out anyway. Inevitably, this happens in the car, and a mad search-by-feel for said paci ensues. Yes, I know that feeling around my son’s car seat for a small plastic nipple while driving down the road is probably not the safest thing, but let’s be honest, neither is driving down the road with a 3 month old screaming at the top of his lungs.

Now, I know there are binky clips and such, but I don’t have any, and I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that you’re really not supposed to use them (well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, anyway). So, I was resigned to doing the one-handed, blind paci-search.  Then, one day I stopped in a store where I could easily spend far too much money in about a nano-second, Baby Bliss, and found something called a Pacimal. It claimed to be  the perfect pacifier–a paci nipple is attached to the back of the head of a stuffed animal lovey. I have to admit the stuffed animal part was what caught my eye first.

Now, usually I’m skeptical of gimmicky-sounding things (sure, you can really lose 20 pounds in 10 days just by thinking thin thoughts…riiiiiiiiiight), but this actually sounded kind of logical. The pacifier nipple is removable from the stuffed animal part and is dishwasher safe. The animal is washing machine safe. It’s also the perfect size for little bitty hands (and has no beady eyes or anything that baby shouldn’t have), and the way it’s all set up actually helps your little angel handle his own paci – within reason. So, when you’re tooling down the road at a very respectable pace (because we all know that new Mommies and Daddies are never running late and never go over the speed limit) and junior loses his paci, he can either get it back himself, since it’s attached to an easy-to-maneuver stuffed animal, or, when he’s still too little to do that, YOU only have to feel for a stuffed animal (Sam has the puppy dog, which Caleb quickly named Max), which is much easier to find than a regular-sized pacifier.

Giving Max the puppy some love.

Now, what if the nipple that comes with the pacimals isn’t the kind your angel prefers? No problem – there’s a nipple adapter available. Just remove the pacimal nipple and pop in the adapter in its place, and the pacimal can work with just about any pacifier. Sam is only so-so on the pacimal nipple, so we’ve got an adapter on the way. However, he LOVES Max, and I see many mad searches for him in our future…(note to self – go buy at least two more Maxes so we always have one on hand!)