Milk Strike

With Elijah, we were fairly strict about weaning him off pacifiers and bottles and other things he derived any and all pleasure from. It was our attempt to toughen him up to make in on the mean streets of upper middle class Evanston. And as he entered his private pre school in his $40 leather Converse sneakers this morning, I think he appreciated how tough we were.

Luca, on the other hand? Meh. He can do whatever he wants. If that means he wears rubber rain boots and a diaper to the Whole Foods, fine by me.

But he is a little long in the tooth for bottles. I’m not wild about the oral fixation-ness of it. Won’t that lead to smoking? Delicious, delicious smoking? Smoking that made you look so cool when you were 24? Man, it would be soooo great to just buy one little pack. No one has to know. One cigarette wouldn’t hurt after all these years, right? Marlboro. That was my brand. Marlboro Ultra Lights. Mmmm. Ultra.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Bottles. Well, we decided the best possible time to wean Luca off bottles was after uprooting him from his home, forcing him to drive across the country and sleep in a room he doesn’t remember in a house that is essentially foreign to him.

Yeah, what could go wrong? Well, he has decided, no bottle, no milk. Flat out refuses to drink milk from a sippie cup, a regular cup, a flask, an udder. Nothing. He simply looks at it like it used to taste good and says, “Baba,” in a wistful way.

I was of the mind that he would eventually come around and drink milk like a normal kid. But it’s been a long time with no vitamin D. He’s starting to get that stooped over look of those old foreign women. And I think his bones are getting brittle. I thought I heard a “crack” when I hugged him today.

Well, long story short, we’re back on bottles. Kid’s gotta have milk. I figure he can go with bottles until he’s 18. Legal cigarette age.