Adventures in Parenting, part I, or getting off the intervention train

Both my spouse and I are adverse to the pacifier for a host of reasons including:
1. If you introduce it, you've got to remove it at some point
2. They're always getting lost or falling on the floor and then you've got frantic kids and parents who have moved the ability to soothe to an object that is unavailable.
3. Children who use pacifiers are more likely to suffer from ear infections than children who don't.

So, we were both set against the pacifier (neither used them ourselves) but then we ended up swaddling E at night - beginning at about 3 weeks of age because she didn't really have good control of her arms and kept waking herself up. Once we started swaddling her she didn't have access to her hands to satisfy her desire to suckle. People (mostly my pediatrician and doula) made me feel awful that I would deny her the opportunity to satisfy that desire. Thus, we introduced the pacifier.

Now at 4 months E is about done with swaddling. She protests being swaddled and frequently frees herself from her "baby straight jacket" straight away. The problem with this is, she has come to see the pacifier as crucial to her sleep (we don't let her have it except at sleep-times). She gets her hands loose and then proceeds to knock the pacifier out of her mouth. Then she gets upset because her motor skills aren't developed enough to get it back in. Lately she has also taken to waking up when she drops the pacifier in her sleep and one of us has got to run in to her room and shove it back in her mouth.

So, her sleep habits, instead of improving, have declined in the last 4 weeks - she is now up at least 3 times a night not even including the fact that she is up once or twice in the first hour after being put to bed (which is also relatively new) while she used to be up once or twice TOTAL. I was hoping that she would be sleeping really successfully without being swaddled before I removed the pacifier but now I see that I won't know how well she can sleep unswaddled until the pacifier is gone.

So, yesterday we took the plunge and took them away. I had to wrestle her down for every nap and last night she was up at least every hour and refused to sleep at all between 4:15 and 5 a.m. Today has been a little better but mostly because she fell asleep in the stroller and slept for nearly 2 hours. I just finished spending 45 minutes getting her down for her late afternoon nap. We don't let her cry in her crib so that means we are holding her and trying to comfort her as she cries inconsolably about the loss of her pacifier.

Makes you feel like a heel...