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I bought a pacifier for Boris today. I didn't really want to; I loathe the idea of waking in the middle of the night, or worse, having to stop the car every 5 minutes to find an ejected binky. However, I've had to reconsider this position for several reasons:

1. He is not a comfort nurser.

2. At 4 months old, Boris has not yet found his thumb. I'm not sure he's likely to; he slurps his fists mainly to tell me he's hungry. The few times that fist-slurping has put him to sleep appear to have been accidental. By contrast, Hamlet -- who, at 6 weeks, spat his pacifier out every time we tried it -- found his thumb by the time he was 3 1/2 months old.

3. Boris prefers to gnaw adult fingers rather than his own, but these don't provide the non-nursing sucking satisfaction he needs. We know this because he sobs after only a few seconds of gnawing.

4. Getting him to sleep under these conditions, at least at night, can be a real test. This is saying something, because we co-sleep. I'd taken to lying beside him, doing a modified version of what Tracy Hogg calls "shush-pat": I pat his chest while he fusses. It has been the only thing that works; he, like his brother, is not a child who can be rocked to sleep.

I tried the pacifier a couple of times this afternoon when he appeared to need to suck rather than nurse. I didn't hold out much hope. "Mom, are you crazy?" his blue eyes seemed to say -- after he spat it out.

Bedtime, though, was a different story. He really needed to suck. After spitting out the binky twice, he took it on the third try -- the charm -- and took only fifteen minutes to get to sleep. The bonus? He spit it out when he was done with it.