Paci Wars: Giving up the Pacifier

The Paci War Saga:  I had not intended to giving up pacifiers for quite some time. It was just a battle that I was choosing not to tackle at this time. Once again, the triplets had other plans in mind… even if they didn’t know what the end result would be.

For over a week now naps and nighttime has been a disaster. It takes them forever to go to sleep and at night they would wake up 1-2 times a night fighting, screaming, and chasing each other around the room. This would, on average, go on for about an hour each time. Needless to say they were exhausted and so was I. Then I realized what they were fighting about… pacifiers! They would go to bed with one pacifier but we would Caitlin two because she would steal the others if not. Well it seems two was not enough anymore for her and she would steal the other children’s pacifiers in the middle of the night, waking them up, and start the fighting. 

So yesterday I decided to see what would happen if I just took them away and hid them. I was prepaired for all out war with this act. To my surprise though it wasn’t too bad. They had the occassional “break down” of crying for their paci but it didn’t last long. Then there was there first nap without the paci. It took them about a half hour to fall asleep. The first 20 mins was crying, crawling under the beds trying to find a pacifier and so forth, but then they went to sleep. They had a wonderful nap and woke up happy.

Then bedtime, the real test. Once again there was a little bit of fussing and searching but they went to sleep quickly and stayed asleep all night. They even woke up a half hour later! I was right. All the craziness was stemming for pacifiers. The one thing we give them for comfort was the one thing that was making them crazy.

We have still had our ups and downs today but not bad at all. They are also talking a lot more now that they don’t have them.