The battle of the pacifier....

I have not wanted to introduce a pacifier to Michelle until our breastfeeding was well established. I think we are now at that point but she has done well without one so I figured, why introduce something that we may have a battle with later trying to take away? However, I have read in a couple of baby books that a pacifier may help refluxing babies by stimulating saliva production to neutralize the acidity. So last night, in an attempt to calm our colicky, refluxing child, we tried the pacifier. My boobs were dry. She had been sucking on them non-stop for hours. They needed time to fill up and Michelle still needed to suck on SOMETHING. I figured it would either be a "Ahh, where have you been all my life???" moment or a "You can't fool me with that mockery of a nipple!" moment. And the verdict? Officially "You can't fool me with that mockery of a nipple!" When I first stuck it in her mouth, there was a very brief quiet moment of "Oh! A nipple!" quickly followed by a crinkled nose spitting out the pacifier and crying louder as if to say "you would ACTUALLY try to feed me silicone? Are you trying to POISON me???" So we waited until she calmed down a little bit and tried again to gently introduce the sucking device. This time she fought it with her tongue, refusing it before it could even enter her mouth. Eventually, when she was just worn out with crying, we tried again and she did actually suck on it for a couple of minutes before realizing she had been tricked. Then, of course, she crinkled her nose, made a face and spit out the imposter. The good news I guess is that we won't have to break her of a pacifier habit. The bad news? Well, I was planning to get pumping breast milk this week so that Barry could give her a bottle in the evenings. My nipples and Barry would appreciate delegating an evening feeding. At 4 weeks, this is apparently the window to introduce a bottle so lets hope the bottle goes better than the pacifier!