Death of a Pacifier

Picture this: coasting along merrily through sunny Antwerp, munchkin peacefully snuggled behind me, the wind blowing through our hair, red-cheeked due to the cold.
As we sail onto a five-way crossing, I hear that sound that I have come to dread of plastic meeting asphalt. I give it five seconds. "M, my binky", a wail erupts behind me.

Time for a parenthesis: yes, I boldly breastfed. Yes, we managed pretty fine until one night, after a lot of sleepless nights due to no more boob protein (nipple biting can be fun, pierced nipples are not), we caved in and plopped a pacifier into her mouth. Since then we have spent hours, nay days trying to prise it from between her lips. School meant relief, as she could no longer demand it full-time. But we are fast approaching the age of 4, and I would like to see her without a pacifier before she is 21. Anyway, I digress.

I screeched to a halt, looked back and there it was, bright and blue in the middle of the crossing. I ventured, 'we have another one at home', only to be met with an incredulous look and a histrionic wail designed to exorcise 700 year old poltergeists from their cubby holes, followed by a conniption of magnamious proportions.

What follows is a perfect example of the lengths desperate parents will go and the idiocy that takes over their brains, when they are tired and not thinking straight and confronted with a meltdown. I dismounted old Piglet (I do have a pink bike. The previous one was green and named Godzilla. My car is named Greta because she will only speak German to me), gave the munchkin the glare of death as I unbuckled her from her seat and put her down and then proceeded to threaten her with unspeakable horrors if she dared move even a millimetre from her position next to the bike. As I moved away from the bike and started running to the middle of the crosswalk, I heard a ginormous crash. A gust of wind had blown the bike over, the munchkin hadn't budged. As I was picking up the bloody pacifier that was the cause of all this madness, I looked around only to see that the blasted traffic lights had changed back to green and that traffic was moving again from 3 sides. Needless to say that I broke Carl Lewis' Olympic record as I sprinted back to the pavement.

The balance of all this drama:
one casualty: the bike's stand was wrenched
one fatwa: on pacifiers (banished to the bed, and I suspect that we will slowly start phasing that out now)
one frazzled mother: me, but my SO served me a glass of champagne to soothe my nerves, and our kind neighbour volunteered to take me munchkin home with her and even graciously treated her to dinner.

Thank God the weekend is here.