I think it was my first foray into parenthood that brought me to the reality that there are more important things than food to a baby. As a young parent I was under the impression that if you had a baby bottle and diapers, you were okay and safe from the ever present crying baby. It was my mother who taught me the meaning of keeping a baby happy when my wife was not there. I did my share of calling mom in panic mode and not knowing what to do because I couldn't get the baby to quit crying. She felt that the easiest way out of any given situation was "THE UMBA", the preferred word in our family for pacifier.
Day to day activities is quite the chore with a child if you don't have all the necessary tools and accessories. Case in point is the Umba; The Umba in our house is what we call the pacifier or as my children at pacifier age would call their life line. For the past 12 years I have spent countless hours looking under furniture, in the backyard or even toy boxes for the ever elusive Umba. I can't count the …show more content…
He will walk around the house calling for his Umba if he does not have one in his mouth until he finds one or has someone else cater to need. The funny thing with him is he can never have enough of the Umba's at one time. There was one instance where he had one in his mouth and was carrying around 6 others in his tiny hands. Weaning a child off a pacifier is a little easier than weaning a child off sucking a thumb. We have some friends of ours that asked us for advice of how to get their child to quit sucking their thumb. Unfortunately we had to tell them we had no experience with that because all of our boy's were pacifier kids and when it came time to get them off. We just started to cut the ends off a little bit at a time until there eventually nothing to suck on. That's when we would tell them that it was time to just throw them away and they