Milk

5:04 a.m. -- 5 mos., 25 days

Baby A eats solid food. That is, if you can define milky rice cereal as "solid."

For weeks she's been gazing at our forks and spoons and wine glasses with murderous intent. She doubtless could have eaten sooner, but our pediatrician was concerned about M's food allergies and our family histories of diabetes. But last week he decided it was time, so for the past three days she has begun wolfing with unadorned delight a tablespoon of rice flakes drenched in three tablespoons of formula. Mouth agape, arms aflail, tremblingly awaiting her tiny spoon, she looks like a ravenous baby bird.

Last night she sat for the first time in her highchair at our dinner table. She was most pleased at the development, banging her multicolored plastic cups on her new white plastic tray with vim.

Though breast milk is no longer Baby A's sole means of sustenance, this doesn't seem to have reduced its significance. Both M's visiting mother and I have had an easier time feeding with a spoon than M. Her proximity apparently leads Baby A to conflate the "food" and "boobie" categories, and she loses focus on the milky cereal and whines for her first and best food source, the nipple.

And the development hasn't meant the demise of the unholy troika of all working mothers seeking to limit formula intake: pumping, freezing, and reheating. Keeping Baby A in breast milk has taken an inordinate amount of parental attention, and the moment our reliance upon it promises to diminish seems an opportunity for reflection.

My recreational drug use is long behind me, but nothing calls to mind the activity of scrambling for every last twig and seed of your quarter-ounce like storing and using breast milk.

For starters, there's the baggie. For a while we were using the breast pump manufacturer's Official Storage Devices, specially demarcated with ounce measurements, made of unusually thick plastic, and costing about 50 cents a pop. Then we realized that we could save about 49 cents by using a regular, thin, undemarcated baggie with a twist tie. So we spend a lot of time opening, sealing, twisting, and unrolling devices designed to store sandwiches but that do a fine job storing liquid.

I can't empathize, but I have some idea what M endures to provide the 8 ounces or so of pumped milk we give Baby A on a typical day. She's lucky in that she has her own office. But in an hour she might get three or four visitors, and few are likely to be unstartled by the sight of a plastic suction device attached to the boss's breast. So she has to secure blocks of her day for the sole purpose of using a machine that, despite droning like a Roto-Rooter pump at full throttle, packs much less punch than Baby A's lips.

The pump comes in a sleek black backpack and has new-fangled plastic tubing, but the 21st century design belies its reliance on 19th century engineering. It requires at least one hand to secure its balky cone-and-bottle recepticle, making it impossible to type or do any work more arduous than a phone call. Removed from the context of suckling and nurturance and human warmth, the pump reduces the magic of breast feeding to its mechanical process, while reducing its users to milk producers -- to feeling like, not to put too fine a point on it, cows on a factory farm.

And let's not even talk about the (needless but apparently unavoidable) guilt that many working moms feel about infant abandonment, of which the pump becomes a portable symbol, fully self-contained.

Compared to the operation that produces it, my job of storing and pouring shouldn't be a big deal. But knowing that every drop has extracted a physical and psychic toll on the woman who provided it tends to ratchet up the pressure. And for a man whose stubby fingers have never displayed anything like nimbleness, not to say grace, the process of transferring frozen milk into bottles for Baby A has had its frenzied moments.

Few of the following tasks would be troublesome under normal circumstances, even for an acknowledged klutz. But the proximity of a hungry, squawling infant changes the equation. I recall in detail only a couple of the incidents required to learn the lessons delineated below. But in broad outline, problem areas include:

-- Defrosting. Remember: baggies can develop holes. Best to defrost them in a bowl, where leaks can be contained.

-- Heating. I put the partially defrosted baggie in a large tea cup filled with steaming water from our tap. (At some point in Baby A's development we'll need to turn down the water heater.) While dunking or testing baggies for frozen milk chunks, scalded fingers are routine.

-- Untwisting and unrolling the baggie. Virtually impossible, repeated experiments have proven, with one arm. Possible results include milk dripping, splashing, or gushing onto countertops and into sinks, where desparate attempts to recapture the spreading droplets remain unavailing. (Sponge soaking and squeezing are, it turns out, ineffective as well as unhygenic.)

-- Pouring from the baggie into a bottle. Re one-armed pouring: See above. Even with arms empty of baby (cue screaming from the crib), it helps to place a bowl beneath the open bottle to catch random rivulets rushing from unexpected baggie sections.

-- Screwing on the bottle top. Nothing like dumping an ounce of milk onto the baby's chest to teach this lesson.

I suppose it would be possible to calculate the number of hard-pumped ounces that have dribbled into our drainage system or Baby A's onesies rather than her digestive tract.

But who's counting?