Fairy, Fairy, Fairy…I will not suck my thumb!!
We all have a security blanket of some sort. Over the years we may have changed our blankets to more socially accepted things, but we all have them; humans are more like the Peanuts’ character Linus in more ways than we would probably care to admit.
My four year old daughter’s Linus trait is sucking her thumb; a disposition that I am sure she had even in the womb and one that has been extremely hard to break. If she had been sold on the pacifier I kept trying to stick in her face as an infant, I would be in the process right now of simply denying her said device (easy). But since I cannot remove her thumbs (legally), my daughter and I seem to be at a standstill.
So, in the war of the digits….think like your enemy.
My opportunity to gain advancing ground in this war was when she had a slight accident that caused her to have a loose front tooth. The dentist explained carefully to her that she could no longer suck her thumb. This violation of her first amendment rights did not sit well at first, but she agreed to comply in the end. It did not take long however to break the law of the Dictator Dentist, and she reverted back to her underground movement of thumb sucking.
Then it hit me. I need to make a game out of it.
Since my daughter has been enamored by fairys and fairy-land stories lately I decided that I would use her love of them as a weapon. The next time I saw her sucking her thumb I took her aside and convinced my daughter that a fairy cannot suck her thumb and fly at the same time. I also told her that every time I said the phrase “Fairy, Fairy, Fairy” she would have to take her thumb out of her mouth and say to me loudly “I WILL NOT SUCK MY THUMB!” This worked so well that we repeated the phrase/game for about a half-hour at her request. By the end if that thirty minute brainwashing session, she was fully trained to stop sucking her thumb at my magic phrase.
It has been months since I struck the final blow in this battle. Every once in a while I will catch my daughter with her thumb in her mouth trying to start the war all over again. Still, all I have to do is say my Napalm phrase and her thumb is right out of her mouth as if it were poisonous. Now, if only I could figure out a phrase to stop her from dating when she is older…..
