Skip to main content

crying over spilt milk; or, the daily life of a dairy cow (part ii)

needless to say, after pumping three times a day in my office (or in a janitor's closet as the case may be!), that milk is a precious commodity. i've heard some moms refer to it as liquid gold, and i'll be honest with you here: it's not far from the truth. except it's gold that you extract from your own body every single day, so there's a certain extra attachment to it.

so one bleary-eyed morning, running late as always, i was i transferring milk into john's bottles to send along to school that day. rushing, i got ahead of myself, and i knocked over a bottle. a full, five-ounce bottle of milk splattered everywhere in my kitchen.

first of all, you have no idea how much surface area five ounces can cover. trust me, you're better off not trying this experiment at home.

second of all, all i could do was stand transfixed in the puddle i'd created. i was soaked to the skin (thinking "i'm even later now, gotta go change clothes ..." and now instead of having precisely the 20 ounces i knew john would drink that daycare, i was short. waaaaaayyy short. my child was going to starve.

while i tried to absorb what had just happened, poor husband walks in. seeing the tears welling in my eyes, he tried to make me feel better. "what's that old saying," he said, "about spilt milk ..."

i'm not proud to say that the words i shouted at him are not repeatable on a family blog and may or may not rhyme with "duck shoe." and i broke down into sobbing tears, devestated at what i perceived to be a mommy failure of epic proportions. i couldn't provide for my child's needs. what kind of mom was i?

of course, i got my act together. at my husband's suggestion, my til-then-only-breastfed son had one bottle of formula that day. and you know what? he was ok. he really was. and since then, there was another time that i left all my milk from a day of pumping at work overnight, and he had ONLY formula that day, heaven forfend! and he still survived.

so yes, now i can agree with my husband. the old saying is true, one should not cry over spilt milk. and i won't ... at least until the next time i decide to mop my floor with breastmilk.

Comments

Claire King said…
Jess this is so great. I didnt realise you had a blog till yesterday. im sorry to say I laughed :)

Claire
john's mom said…
no worries claire - i can laugh now too! and i only just started the blog a week or so ago, so you're not far behind :)
ah ha... well ive just started one myself. Today.. after reading your one :)

Popular posts from this blog

i'm furberizing my baby

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean

on lullabies

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

home

annapolis rock  1988 thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions. yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year. i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child. 199