I typed all of this out last week, only to have it disappear into the expanse of the world wide web, so wish me luck (and try to hang on for the entire piece... I'll try to be entertaining!)
The end of my world, Part I:
On the first Sunday of the year, Adam demonstrated a new resolution of his own - or at least showed his resolved to show off some terrible-two previews...
He was getting pretty restless towards the end of sacrament meeting, so I got out his little bottle of milk I keep on hand to help settle him down and buy us time until we could go home and get that much-needed Sunday nap. He grabbed the bottle, took a swig, pulled the bottle out of his mouth, and then looked at me with a look that in hind-sight said, "I wonder how much trouble I'm about to get myself into?"
And with that, he spewed milk wherever it would spew with great glee and gusto. And a little giggle. I thought I was gonna kill him! The family across the aisle from us tried hard not to laugh. He was sitting on my lap at the time, so I scooped him up and found I had a fairly penitent 18-month-old buy the time we reached the kitchen and I could give him the "that was naughty" talk (trying the whole time to not burst out laughing, myself!)
The end of my world, Part II:
So, after the sacrament meeting incident (btw - he luckily didn't have the mouth-strength to get milk anywhere but on himself...), I knew that we had come to the end of bottles in Sacrament meeting. He was having a hard enough time taking to bottles publicly ever since he saw David's cousin's 5-month-old sucking on a bottle that looked identical to his. But, I admit, it has been my "keep-him-quiet" crutch while trying to teach him to enjoy playing quietly in Sacrament meeting.
And then it was Monday. We'd been steadily trying to get him "detoxed" after Christmas (I'll post our 12-step program as soon as I get it figured out). Even though it was the end of the bottle for Church, I knew that I still needed it to help coax him to sleep. Monday night, trying to get him back on schedule, I put him to bed at his pre-Christmas-crazy appointed bedtime of 9:00pm. Hoping to get him to be okay with this action, I lovingly prepared a bottle of warm milk.
He wasn't so thrilled. He SCREAMED. I ignored. He was shrill. I turned on "Mamma's Boys". Soon enough, though, all was still and he was sleeping soundly.
At 4:30am, though, he woke up with a little cry that I thought I could ignore, but soon he was pretty upset, so I got up to try to soothe him back to sleep. I found, however, that he was soaked. Having copious amounts of mommy-compassion, I changed him and his bedsheets in the dark hoping he'd go right back to sleep. I was little surprised that his diaper was pretty dry, but I figured that he'd somehow managed to just "bypass" the diaper. It's happened before.
After everything was changed, I put him back to bed, but he was not interested in sleep. I grabbed his bottle, thinking that some warm milk would help.
I took off the lid, filled the milk, popped it in the microwave, then put the lid back on. And that's when I saw it: the night before he had been so mad at me for putting him to bed, he'd bitten the tip right off of the nipple! He wasn't wet from wetting through his diaper - he'd been soaked with the milk that escaped! Suddenly, my compassion was replaced with a "just desserts" attitude (and, again, amusement - I know... really effective parenting!).
So, that was the end of the bottle. Entirely. Completely. My only regret is that I didn't get a picture of the damage before David threw it away.
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