Warning: Parenting may cause loss of convicitions

I have received several responses to the picture of Little One a few posts ago. Ranging from, "I can't believe there is a pacifier in that child's mouth" to "ha! I knew you'd put a pacifier in that child's mouth!"
Well, it's not like I dislike pacifiers like I do french fries. It's not like I hate them like I do soda or video games where there's shooting people. Or despise them like those Bratz dolls, which are like my Mommying nemesis. In fact if me and Bratz dolls ever met in an alley somewhere, I'm pretty sure we'd start circling each other and snapping emphatically (c'mon people, West Side Story!). But it's true that pacifiers and I have been only coolly civil towards one another. I did not, I confess, plan on inviting Pacifiers to the Little One party.
The reason is this. If some person came up to me and told me that they were going to punch me in the face, no way to avoid it, but I could choose whether to get punched right then, or instead at some nebulous point in the future, well, I'd point right at my cheekbone and say, "put 'er there, pal". Because I'd rather just get it over with.
That is the thing about pacifiers. They do stop the crying- for now. But they are like baby caffeine. At first it's just a little pick me up here and there, and then before you know it you have to have it every day or you might get all Garfield on a Monday, and soon you're blowing your rent money on Starbucks. And, unless you want your child to be sporting the binky in kindergarten, it has to go at some point.
Giving a child something addictive and then taking it away = CRYING. Aaaaaaand we're back to square one. And I have seen some truly epic battles over trying to ectomy the pacifier. And I have known lots of babies who can't sleep through the night because they haven't learned to soothe themselves, so when the pacifier falls out they have to scream until someone sticks that cork back in the bottle.
So it the scheme of things, it seems sort of counterproductive. However. As my Doctor astutely observed, doing no good for my resolve at all, Little One is immensely comforted by sucking. Some babies have a strong instinct for that and some don't care, and Little One is definitely leading category one. Without a pacifier, she will try to hoover up her hands, your hands, her outfit, whatever she can get to. And when she does, it makes her feel lots better. And, as we all know now, there are times (punctually 6-10pm, in fact) that she is pretty darn unhappy.
In other words, I plead GERD.
Yeah, yeah, I folded. Like an origami chicken. I confess! Truth be told, that thing is a miracle. Pacifiers and me, we've mended fences and become pals. I pretty regularly invite Pacifiers to hang out these days. To come to dinner, for instance, or out on errands. I still think J and I have set ourselves up for hard times later, but the cost-benefit balance seems to have shifted based on the altered decible levels in our house since Pacifiers and I made up.
That's right, I'm a sucker. A softy, a pushover, a sissypants! But I am a sucker with a much happier Little One, and far less homicidal neighbors. So go ahead and rub it in, just don't get any Big Ideas here, people. First one to give Little One a Bratz doll gets the alley-dance. AND snapping.