Here’s a quick and dirty story that goes out to all the Moms and Dads who have ever given their little one a sippy sup or a bottle (AKA all of you).  Specifically, at least in my case, a bottle of formula.  This particular bottle was given in the living room, and having gotten sidetracked with other house-and-baby-related stuff, the bottle entered the realm of the missing.

For the purposes of this story, I will save my Mother-in-law the embarrassment and say that it was me who left the formula bottle on the table.  Our Rosie was about 9 months old at the time so the living room was obviously a bit of a mess (like age is relevant!), toys scattered around, the fact that we have both a cat and a dog possibly playing a role in the end result….which came approximately 2 months later.

It had remained a mystery for that 2 months what had happened to that bottle.  My wife knows exactly how many bottles we have in our possession. She’s a machine. When that number diminished by 1, since Rose had just started daycare, we likely (wrongly) assumed that our signals had gotten crossed with the daycare and perhaps a bottle had mistakenly been thrown away or returned to the another parent accidentally. In fact, that missing bottle was never missing! It was with us all along, eventually becoming a not-so-cherished part of our family. A living, breathing entity birthed from a womb of sorts. A couch womb. The “Entity” is what appeared to me one fateful afternoon when I happened upon the missing bottle while looking for the remote control under the couch.

I can safely assume in hindsight that the cat was knocking it around and it eventually found its way under that couch. But what I found was no bottle. The “liquid” inside had hair. The interior was the colour of life itself…and I couldn’t help at that time but to name it Gary. For no particular reason other than the fact that it looked like a Gary.

Anyhow, the simple moral of the story is this – Don’t leave a formula bottle on the coffee table for the cat to possibly knock onto the floor and possibly play with and eventually push under the couch only for you to assume it was lost when in fact the milk was growing arms and legs over the next several weeks probably resulting in some kind of health hazard or maybe a new art form depending on how you look at it.  Parenting is hard.  Happy Halloween!

Sincerely,

The Funny Daddy Accountant