Eye of the Tiger

Before I had kids, it always drove me crazy when I would see an older kid with a pacifier. You've seen these kids. Way too old for a pacifier. If the kid can take his pacifier out of his mouth, say a complete sentence with prepositional phrases, conjunctions and adverbs then stick said pacifier back in his mouth, then I think he is too old.

So I said, "When I have kids, they won't get hooked on a pacifier."

When both Fletcher and Luke were about three or four months old, we took the pacifiers away. Neither one of them were that interested in it anyway.

Problem solved.

Well, until Fletcher started sucking his two fingers and sniffing his burp rag. Luke? He found his thumb and sniffs his stuffed dog Rocky's tail.

I'd say pacifiers are the least of my worries.

This is Fletcher at five months:

And this is Luke at about 9 months:

We broke Fletcher of the habit of sucking his fingers during the day, in the car, while watching tv, at preschool, etc. We just couldn't get him to stop at night. We had his dentist talk with him. We tried special gloves. We tried the nasty stuff people use to get kids to stop biting their nails. Nothing has worked so far. And he's five and a half. And his permanent teeth are starting to come in. The dentist told us that once his permanent teeth start coming in, any kind of thumb/finger sucking can really mess up his alignment.

We need to start saving now for orthodontia times two.

My creative and brilliant husband figured out that Fletcher really likes the concept of battles. Like the battles in Star Wars and the battles in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. So Kevin decided to approach this finger sucking habit as a battle that Fletcher has to fight. It has really led to some great discussions with him about how he will have to fight battles all his life - big ones and little ones - but how God can help him win the battle.

So for the last several weeks we've been using our baby video monitor to watch him fall asleep. Because he knows he is on camera, he has worked really hard on not sucking his fingers. Kevin also came up with the idea of drawing swords on both sets of fingers each night before he goes to bed. If he subconsciously sucks them in the middle of the night then the ink wears off on one hand and we know he didn't win the battle that night.

If the ink is still there, then he gets to put a sticker on his Battle Chart.

Kevin made his "Mix Tape" (see yesterday's post) of great battle-fighting songs to get him fired up to win this battle. (Brown Eyed Girl was just thrown in there because I happen to have brown eyes and I happen to like that song. )

Hopefully, he will win the battle. By the way, we also took away all of his burp rags. He had quite the collection. He associates sucking his fingers with sniffing his burp rag. I told him I was mailing them to his new baby cousin Wesley. He seemed ok with that and hasn't asked for them since then.

Happy Birthday tomorrow to Uncle D! He's been a part of our family for thirty years now. That's a long time to put up with our brand of crazy. I'm sure he could tell you some stories from all these years. The boys love going to Uncle D's house because he has all the cool toys like a real tractor. We love you and we hope you have a wonderful day.