Yes, I realize you’re probably as surprised as I am. But there I was, struggling with a screaming child, wishing for the first time in my life — and, God willing, the last — that I was sporting a lactating breast, when a solution occurred to me. This was not the sort of “meandering, eventually finds it way into your frontal lobe” sort of occurrence, this was more of the “slap in the forehead” type.
See, I was able to get Grace to take a pacifier for extremely short periods of time whilst I struggled to find another possible position with which to convince her that the bottle was actually her mother’s breast. (To completely no avail, by the way.) And then — SMACK! — it occurred to me that perhaps, perchance, just maybe, the problem was that she didn’t like being smacked in the lips with the hard plastic top of the bottle. “After all,” thought I, “isn’t this the basic difference between one of these Nuk pacifiers and the bottle?” Well, if you don’t count all the stuff that comes out of the end of one and not the other, but you know what I’m getting at.
So I grabbed one of the pacifiers (sorry, Abby!) and cut a whole in the middle of it. It now resembles something like a large rubber washer. I plopped it over the nipple so it would rest between the bottle and Grace and… (did I mention I might be a certifiable genius?) it worked like a charm.
Ah… the sweet sound of success: a happily (greedily) feeding baby.