Wait, there are how many mommy bloggers?

I'm reading a lot about blogging, for a piece I am writing. About mommy blogging, in particular, in the US and here in Switzerland. I came upon a number in neighborhood of about 3.9 million mom bloggers in the United States. Do you know how much data those people could provide about any number of life issues?! About marriage, about kids, about women's health, about parenting and work and all the rest.

That is a lot of writing about parenthood.

And given how confusing I find the whole "pacifier surrender" question, for our particular situation, I'm thinking that the data in there could be so useful. I'll bet there are at least two groups of kids when it comes to pacifier users. The casual and the addicts. I think my kid is the latter. And I would love to know more about her type, who are still walking around during the day with coat collars or anything else portable to chew on, even when they don't have a pacifier. Who are extremely orally focused, and get a lot of comfort from that. Is she at risk for smoking and a host of other drugs, the withdrawl from which I may one day have to witness in the same way I held her shrieking in the middle of last night when she didn't have her pacifier? Was that a foreshadowing?

Turns out, she didn't even remember that crying.

I do.

It was rough. On me and M more than her, apparently. And we finally gave it back to her (it had been her choice to try without, and, honey, I gave it the grad school try). And retreated in slight panic to the living room, kind of feeling echoes of her early months, shrieking in the middle of the night. Sheesh.

Or maybe she will just always chew on something as an adult, and a pen will do fine. Will trying to break her of this habit lead to good things or bad? Or at the very least, is she likely to snap out of it, like with so many other things that seem to just click into place with time?

Come on, Big Data, start looking at child development - things like colic factors and behaviors, tantrums, milestones, and, please, first of all (and soon), pacifiers.

Thanks. Hope to hear from you soon.

Giving the pacifier back

My daughter loves her "nuggi" (the Swiss German name for a pacifier).

I don't love it. Sometimes I'm just embarrassed by it - that some other kids her age (and seemingly every last child in Istanbul) gave theirs up months ago. Granted, I feel embarrassed when I'm in that "my parenting is what makes her who she is" state of mind. Sometimes I just know we're getting close to 3 years old and both the pediatrician and dentist say that is the time to be done with it.

We've gone through so many cycles of my pushing to limit it. She doesn't use it anymore, even for naps, at daycare. And now that constitutes much of the work week. At some point when she was around 20 months old, after a long trip, we found ourselves in double-binky territory for sleeping, and I was beside myself with anguish about it. First world problems, indeed. Except that, if she awoke in the middle of the night, and couldn't find both pacifiers, I or M was called in, loudly, to help.

I imagined that by this time, close to 3 years old, she's be over them for naps. For a while, she was falling asleep in her stroller without them. But not for long.

Now the challenges of convincing her to go sit on the potty in the morning, and getting her cooperation to get dressed (generally and issue of mine, but vital when my back is acting up), have gotten greater. They are accompanied by a lot of whining (I'm not saying whose is louder), and me finding myself trying more time-outs for not putting on socks when I've asked. That isn't what I need time-outs for. And in general, I can always use some practice in negotiating and compromise.

So the nuggi is back in our life, no longer removed once she is out of bed (although for a month or two that helped her stay in bed a bit longer and me get that last 5 minutes of sleep I needed to not be a zombie). It stays with her as long as she is making progress on the taking off of the pajama, the diaper, the sitting on the potty, the getting dressed. And in the evening it calls her name, encouraging her to sit still a bit more while I finish brushing her teeth.

I get it, it is bad for her dental something or other. Looking at that last sentence, perhaps I don't get it. It is bad for something. But so is having a morning full of tears and cajoling and general unhappiness.

The pacifier has taken some ground back. For now. And if a second binky tries any campaigning, forget about it. No deal. But one nuggi, I've conceded that ground.

Do they even make binkies in my size?

Two things have been going on at our house lately that probably shouldn't mix. We started trying (on my insistence) to wean our daughter of her pacifier, and she is having a "don't touch me, help me, comfort me, push my stroller, carry me, mom" month. The latter I've posted about before, and I'm still working through my resentment and hurt feelings some of the time.

I'm not so far gone that I can't see the benefits of having a daddy's girl. I get a break. I can go lay down with a magazine for 5 minutes because she could care less what I'm doing. But the becoming just a cook and cleaner is tough on the ego (good thing I've started work again) because I've been so focused on successfully navigating motherhood and bonding with her these last 18 months that it is a slap in the face to be physically pushed away by her tiny hands. "Ne, ne ne ne ne!" she shouts in Lithuanian, her one unconscious concession to my influence.

I feel pretty alone in figuring out how to deal with it, in that I don't feel like I have viable, mature models for how to weather this storm. How do I not take it personally? Should I stay in the room, or can I leave to pout a bit and cool off? What does it mean about me? Or is it just about me as a mother versus her father? Is it a phase? What have others gone through?

This is where Facebook has once again brought me comfort, from those who've gone before me and seen it pass as a phase. From R, posting on here, that's she's also felt hurt by it. And the parenting forums also brought some relief, through my tears yesterday (I'm still hoping it was a PMS day, how emotionally raw I felt by evening), assuring me that it is a phase, that it happens to many people, but most importantly for me, letting me know that a lot of people feel hurt by it. Knowing that my experience, as well as my reaction, is common, helps. That this is a tricky thing to navigate, especially for those of us who are still working through self-esteem issues.

And once again I'm convinced to try to fake not feeling hurt, in the hope that the practice will help me take it better, to concentrate more on myself as a person and not just a mom. Maybe it is finally time for me to take that 3 day trip by myself now. As usual, I can swing quite far in either direction, so at some point I even wondered if I should try to get pregnant again if this was a long phase, because then she wouldn't mind me not being as physically available. Yeah, that last one has been set aside, but it was a good exercise in trying to think around the hurt.

But it is important for me to acknowledge the hurt, because that was not something that was done often in my family. And you can't deal with something, or work through something that you don't admit exists.

There are some changes in our house, now. I've asked M to make sure he takes care of himself enough during the day to be able to be her one-and-only in the evenings and to have the energy for it. I have to find some set of things that A and I can do together, just the two of us. Things she does with her mama. After some serious screaming in the middle of the night, which did not result in a poopy diaper, I seem to have come back into vogue in A's world and we had a fun morning together. And given how much I could have used a huge pacifier this weekend, and a bunch of parenting forums that tell of kids growing out of binkies on their own time, I'm thinking that A should keep hers until she's ready to let go of them.