Giving a 6 month old a dummy

[Beaverleybeaver]

My baby girl has a virus so naturally I've been giving her lots of cuddles and offering her milk as often as possible to keep ontop of it. Usually she'll settle OK at night but last night all she wanted to do was pacify on the bottle. She's been feeding ok during the illness and wasn't interested in drinking at said time, just in soothing herself with the bottle teat. Usually she soothes herself with her soft toy, sucking on its ear but that just hasn't worked during her sickness. Today I have caved and given her a dummy for the first time in her life and it settled her straight away, it was like a revelation after a couple of sleepless nights and sofa chained days. I am worried now though that I'm destined to use a dummy long term which I never wanted to do. Does anyone have any experience using dummy's intermittently? Is that possible? Now I've started is that it?

I used it intermittently with DS2 when he was about 4 months old. Horrendous reflux, other medical stuff going on and hardly slept.

I kept it to sleeptime only (except for times of illness and desperation).

I hated dummies before that, but I really had to let go of my hang-ups about it. I really beat myself up over it which in hindsight was silly. It saved our sanity and made him calmer.

He never had one at day care (I went to back to work when he was 18months old) and I cannot recall exactly when we stopped but he was still in his cot. I do recall we got to the point when he'd fall asleep, dummy would fall out and he'd just sleep on through.

Make sure you have about 4 of her fav types when they disappear down the sides of the cot at silly hours so you can just lob let her have her dummy fix without pulling the cot out!