As I’ve mentioned before, my husband sprinkles pacifiers in our daughter’s crib each night in hopes that always having a pacifier within easy reach will help her sleep better.
Despite our best efforts and my husband’s “dream paci” approach, our toddler still sometimes cries in the middle of the night because she can’t find a pacifier. As we see on the video monitor, her pacifiers have fallen through the crack between her crib and the wall, and onto the floor under the crib (we think she does this rearranging on purpose).
This is why I so loved a solution my friends recently came up with to partly solve the pacifiers falling through the crib crack problem. They created what they call a “pacifier bar,” a trick that is today’s hint.
Basically, they took an extra wood closet rod they had around their apartment and rested it on two nails they hammered into the wall. The rod rests perfectly between the crib and the wall, creating a rounded shelf of sorts.
My friends’ “Pacifier Bar”
The bar now helps prevent the pacifiers from falling out of their daughter’s crib (at least on the wall-side of the crib), and makes the pacifiers easier for them, and their daughter, to grab in the middle of the night. The trick, they say, “has greatly improved her sleep! And ours!”
To be sure, there are other tricks parents can try to solve the same problem, such as attaching a pacifier directly onto pajamas (an approach some parents commenting on Parent Hacks suggest and one that I’m too scared to try). Or parents could try weaning tots off the pacifier completely, as many moms commenting on Circle of Moms recommend. In fact, it seems that a sign it’s time to wean may be when pacifier sprinkles no longer work.
If pacifier weaning sounds like a good plan to you, the Baby Sleep Site has some helpful tips on how to do it, and Barbara Rockwell suggests some strategies for pacifier weaning over at Pop Sugar (unfortunately, it looks like we’ve let my daughter pass the ideal age for dropping a pacifier).
But for those parents who, like me, aren’t ready to take away the pacis (i.e. those of us who have sold our souls to pacifiers, as Jill Krause of Baby Rabies aptly puts it), my friends’ frugal trick may be worth trying.
What are your tips for dealing with pacifier-related nighttime wakeups and pacifier weaning? Share them, and your thoughts on the Pacifier Bar, below.
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someone is an absolute genius. I love this idea
We had this issue and then we invested in multiple Wubabubs (pacifier with a stuffed animal attached) they’re too big to fit through the slats and she can easily find them in the dark.
I like the idea of just dropping the binkie all together. I’ve been weaning my tot off his binkie slowly over the course of 2 months, he does well with out it. No more glow-in-the-dark binkie hunts. 🙂