Armistice

The War on Breastfeeding is finally over. It was a long war -- 5 months -- and there were many casualties, nearly all of them financial. In the end, we didn't so much lose the war as we simply agreed to stop fighting it. As I'm sure you can all guess, this was not a decision arrived at lightly by Hurricane Kitty, but luckily it doesn't mean the end of the breast pump. The only thing that she likes more than playing with her son is sitting in dark closets for 20 minutes at a time with a large vacuum attached to her chest while the people outside stare at the door and wonder what in God's name is going on in there.

I'm sure it would be tougher to let that go.

But now that it is over, we must direct our attention elsewhere. We must focus on the tools that we now must use to grow our boy up healthy and strong. I'm speaking, of course, of super fancy high-tech baby bottles and ridiculously expensive imported small-batch artisanal formulas.

When the Ninja was in his final stages of arrival, Kitty and I got in an argument on the depressing drive to Hell on Earth. Kitty was explaining about how, when we introduce the bottle, we would need to have several kinds available to ensure that we had one that Finn would take. I pondered that thought for about 3 seconds before declaring it "full of crap." "There are no differences between baby bottles," I exclaimed with absolutely zero knowledge on the subject. "It's just a jar with a nipple, why do we have to buy more than one kind?"

First off, I'm an idiot. Secondly, I had not yet learned about BPA and how it is guaranteed to kill your child within 30-seconds of it entering the house. Kitty knew both of those things already and we left Babies R Us seventeen hours later with two bottles: BPA-free Born Free and BPA-filled Dr. Brown's. Of course, Finn hated the Born Free. Turns out, this was OK because I loved the Dr. Brown's. There are so many parts! It's like you're putting together a model car 6 times a day! Unfortunately, there was the BPA.

I don't know how much you guys know about Seattle, but there are two things residents here excel at: looking down their noses at you and passive agression. I was afraid that if I were out in public, feeding Finn from a bottle with BPA, that legions of Seattleites would pedal their recumbent bicycles over, stop right next to us, and discuss with one another the risk that I was posing to my child while watching out of the corners of their eyes to make sure I could hear them. That on its own wouldn't bother me, but I'd be worried that they'd spill their half-caff non-fat triple grande lattes on the boy and I'm afraid their North Face jackets wouldn't clean that up very well.

So I did what I do best. I searched for the most expensive bottle I could find. With the BPA scare in full effect, BPA-free plastics and glass bottles are all the rage. I couldn't find a Dr. Brown's BPA-free bottle at the time, so I began my hunt for the Dr. Brown glass bottle. I probably would have had an easier time finding Nessie. These things were sold out all over the interwebs. Amazon.com had them for $50 a pop, when list price is only $15. If I was going to pull this off, I would have to rely on the most important skill that I learned in college.

Those of you that misspent your youth and young adulthood in the same way that I did are likely very good at this too. I'm speaking, of course, of scoring tickets to sold out shows. I can count on 1/2 of one hand how many concerts that I've been shut out of. Working the phones, while filling out my mail-order and simultaneously hitting refresh on my browser used to be old hat. The problem here is that unlike on-sale dates for concerts, none of the baby bottle sites would tell you when the bottles were coming back in stock. You had to wait for an email and jump right on them. I was 15 minutes late on the first email and 7 minutes late on the second and stock was sold out before I got there. It wasn't until the seventh email that I hit paydirt.

I've now succeeded in doing this twice, since I had forgotten that I had to buy bottles for daycare too. I had to give them my first score, because I certainly didn't want to look like a bad parent feeding my kid BPA.

I won't get into the formula bit here, since my fingers are bleeding from typing, but here's what my bottle setup looks like now. Pretty sweet, huh? Let me know if any of you want to come over and put some of these bad boys together. It's a good time.