The Bottle

There was nothing quite like being left alone with a three-month-old in an Airbnb just outside of Denver, where the mountains jutted straight up, towering above the dimly lit two story cottage.

I was there with my wife on a work trip. She traveled to restaurant franchises around the country and helped them meet broader corporate standards. She was excellent at the job, and it paid well. And I, well, I was never very good at making money.

Hence, baby duty.

This was our first child, so a lot was new. The latest challenge had been convincing our little miracle child to take a bottle. Bottles were so, if I may be entirely lowbrow, unbooblike.

Try as we might, it seemed no combination of nipple shape, flow, bottle size, angle, prompting, or anything else could get our child to feed off the milk container.

And that's a very large problem when your wife is 45 minutes away at work and doesn't have time to be shuttling back and forth to breastfeed her little one.

Nonetheless, we found ourselves in a situation where I simply had no choice but to convince the baby to drink from a bottle.

My wife and I discussed it.

"You've just gotta talk to her gently, let her take the nipple, let her dictate the flow. Don't force it."

"I never force it."

"You did that one time."

"That was the only time it worked."

"Yeah, and then never again!"

"If she's hungry enough, she'll take it."

So that was the plan: wait till she was too hungry not to eat.

Still, I had my doubts about the strategy.

So when the baby began to gnaw rabidly at her fingers, I thought I ought to try to get some milk down her.

Only, the problem was I couldn't find the bottles we'd packed.

Or had we not packed them at all, and instead left them on the kitchen counter?

Just as Baby Betty began to cry, there was a knock at the door.

I hardly had time for visitors, and I was a bit embarrassed I couldn't keep my poor child soothed--it was hard enough being a stay-at-home-dad (leaving no room for error, or judgment would come in many forms).

Still, curiosity got the best of me. I went to the door and opened it.

Nobody there.

Except there was a baby bottle on the floor with a note.

The note simply said: "A one time thing. — The Milkmaid."

"Ha!" I laughed to myself. What an unusual prank the Airbnb host must be playing.

Perhaps they've got cameras set up.

Still, it was worth a shot.

I took the bottle inside and washed it thoroughly. Then I heated up some refrigerated milk my wife had pumped the night before. I poured it into the bottle and carried it over to my poor, starving baby.

Not starving—she'd eaten a few hours ago.

But still, in her mind, this was the end. We were leaving her to wither away from lack of sustenance. Of course, never in a million years would we let that happen.

I placed the bottle in her mouth, and to my surprise, she latched immediately!

She proceeded to chug nigh the entire thing.

That's when my wife called.

"The strangest thing just happened to me."

I paused, my own strange experience on the tip of my tongue.

"What happened?" I asked eagerly.

"I found the milk bottles in my work bag."

"What an odd place for us to put them," I said.

"That's the weird thing. I haven't opened my bag since we left home. I'm on my way back now so you can feed her."

"No worries," I said. "I got it all sorted."

"How do you mean?" she asked, her voice concerned.

"Well," I said, looking down... I froze. In my hand was not a milk bottle at all... but rather... nothing.

"That's weird," I said aloud.

"What's weird?"

"It's just... I don't know. I can't explain it, but our daughter is fed. I gotta go, I'll call you right back," I said, and hung up.

I looked around for the Milkmaid's note but found nothing.

The baby was asleep, and her belly was clearly full of the jolly good stuff.

I called my wife back to let her know she didn't need to come back just yet; the baby would be good for a couple of hours.

I got on my phone and Googled "milkmaid," but did not find anything useful on any spooky forum.

I guess, perhaps I had fed my baby... with my imagination.

Or maybe the sleep deprivation had gotten to me.

Or incredibly, somewhere out there, is a mythical milkmaid roaming around and aiding poor stay-at-home-dads.

Still, I wasn't sure what to tell my wife. She would certainly think me crazy if I told her the truth.

A little while later, I heard a stir from the bassinet. Baby Betty was waking up again. She often liked to feed just after her naps. I rummaged through the cupboards in search of some container or another bottle left by the milkmaid, to no avail.

Betty quickly began to cry. I closed my eyes, annoyed I'd told my wife to stay at work. I whispered to myself, feeling more than a little crazy, "Just one more time, please."

Then I made a quick trip to the bathroom to to come up with a plan on how to feed my baby.

As I sat down on the toilet, I glanced up and saw, sitting on top of the toilet paper rolls, a bottle from the milkmaid.

Just as I was about to leave the bathroom to fill the bottle with milk, my wife walked through the door.

She came into the bathroom and gave me a look which was something to effect of, "Our daughter is in the other room wailing. What, pray tell, could you be doing in here that's so important?"

"I uh, was filling up her bottle," I said, raising my hand to show her.

"What bottle?" she asked, eyes filled with doubt.

That's when I felt the empty air around my hand.

"That's funny. It was just here a minute ago..." I said, trailing off.

"Well, it's not there now. It's a good thing I decided to come home early. I had a feeling things weren't as under control as you suggested."

I stared blankly, at a loss for words.

From that point on, I always double-checked my bags for the bottles, and the milkmaid never came again—or needed to.