pacifier roulette

One of the primary ways we know that Kaden has actually fallen asleep, versus merely resting his eyes, is that his pacifier falls out of his mouth.

So, if the cause and effect relationship is: pacifier falling out of mouth = asleep then could you expect the reverse to also be corollary?

My natural affinity for judging things from empirical evidence means I needed to test this. Does removing a pacifier make him fall asleep? If I want the little cujo to hit the sack do I just yank the pacifier out of his mouth?

Before you scoff too loudly, it turns out that this does (carefully & sometimes) work. No, I have not found the magic baby OFF switch that allows me to plug him with a pacifier when he's wide awake and hungry, then by quickly yanking it out cause him to turn into a calmly snoring lump of jello.

But it does work. Turns out that if he has a pacifier in his mouth he gets into sucking it.. enough so that it keeps him awake longer than he would otherwise have. So (here is the tricky part) if you just catch him when he is close to asleep (eyes closed, sucking away calmly) and gently tug the pacifier out of his mouth then he puckers his lips for a second upon exit and then BAM he's asleep. We go on with our lives, he gets extra shut-eye, everyone is happy.

That is, unless you timed it wrong. Then he starts throttling back and forth because he was perfectly happy and you had to go yank something out of his mouth FOR NO GOOD REASON. You've added a good 15 minutes to his going to sleep time, all because of this ridiculous shortcut you read on the Internet.

Start-Up Mom doesn't have the stomach for it (risk isn't her thing). She starts to pull on it and he starts sucking back and she backs away in horror. Me, I just yank the sucker out and wait five seconds to see if I'm a champ or a chump. She gets consistency, I get volatility, it fits us both.

PS - we've solved the noise issue I ranted about in my last post by purchasing the loudest white noise machine we could buy, which also has this rather unique cooling feature (see more here).