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Show Bees WAXING by Mary Bee lems when I came to them . . . or better yet, I'd let her husband worry about taking the pacifier away from her. AS IT TURNED OUT, I had no worries. At four months she suddenly realized that there were butter things to do than just lie quietly, subdued by such artificial means. She d-1 i V I Hat nobody I mean NOBODY was going to shut her up by putting a plug in her mouth. So much for a mother's worries about neurosis now for the next problem how to find enough energy to keep up with her. Mary Bee WHEN I WAS YOUNG and foolish I had a very low opinion of any mother who would give her baby a pacifier. I had been raised to believe they were unhealthy, un-healthy, unwise and slightly immoral. (In my town, no self-respecting mother EVER took her baby out in public with a pacifier. What she did in the privacy of her home was, of course, only a matter of back-fence gossip.) Besides, giving a baby a pacifier might (horror of horrors) hor-rors) lead to thumb sucking. But when our little Krissy reached the "I'm -old-enough -to- stay-awake-but-don't-know stage, I did what every other modern mother moth-er does, I gave her a pacifier. I'M NOT SURE whether this was because I was older and wiser or just because I was older and tireder. The thought of going through all those hours of bottles of water, walking the floor, feed her more, feed her less, lay her on her tummy, PAREGORIC, and all the old-time old-time (useless) cures for colic, din't appeal to me. I'll admit I had a few misgivings. mis-givings. I could see my little daughter, grown and beautiful, going to liigh school with her trusty pacifier ii 'av h?yt . . ... or with deformed teeth . . . ... or sucking her thumb! (THUMB SUCKING by now didn't worry me too much. My years of shrewd observation had convinced me that if the Good Lord didn't want babies to suck their thumbs he wouldn't have put them at such a convenient spot on the ends of their arms. Besides, the thumb-sucking problem seemed to be just another version of the old egg and the chicken parody. Only in this case it is, "which comes first, the thumb-sucking or the worrying about it?") Anyw-y I gave her the pacifier in spite of my misgivings and it proved a sure ::ure for fussiness. Of coursn I worried about her becoming neurotic or dependent de-pendent upon the pacifier but I decided I'd just face those prob- |