A few weeks ago, Eleri found her thumb. She has developed amazing control over it, and can now get it into her mouth pretty much whenever she's upset.
Now, self-soothing is an excellent thing. With Clio, we decided early on that pacifiers were bad. Encouraging her to learn how to calm herself seemed like a gift that would keep on giving. (When talking about this today, a colleague suggested that we need to continually figure out how to self-sooth to survive in life.)
Fast forward two years, and as we watch the development of our second thumbsucker, we realize the drawbacks: leaving the soothing in their control also leaves the weaning in their control, and while you can take away a pacifier, you can't exactly take away the thumb. As with so many things the second time around, our philosophy switched in favor of convenience, and we have really tried to get Eleri hooked on the paci (bobo, sousou, nuk, whatever), but she simply prefers her thumb. The Doctor says not to worry about it (yet), and that they tend to outgrow it on their own, but looking through old photos, it seems that the likelihood that Clio will have her thumb in her mouth has only increased over time. Although maybe it's just photographs; at the mall with Marni last weekend I passed a Gap advertising a casting call, and mused about sending in Clio's photos (you never know, right?), until I remembered the WallMart photo experience this past spring: the poor photographer had to bribe Clio's thumb out of her mouth for every shot!
Clio's Thumb. A love story in photos:
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