timothy j. lambert

Hanley Inc. is an environmentally conscious company. It's green. It's organic. It's all health, all the time. Unfortunately, this means I have to serve soy formula to Boss Lady Hanley. It's good for her, which is wonderful, but it's not so great coming out of her. Burping her afterward is a rather rancid experience. Even though she's moving on to baby food, she still gets a bottle of soy formula in between meals. These days I mix in two tablespoons of fortified cereal with the formula, which she greedily sucks down like a Hoover surfing dunes in the Sahara with an extension cord.

I gave Hanley her mid-morning bottle today and she was slurping away as if she hadn't eaten in a week. I thought, Damn, girl. Breathe honey. I was surprised the bottle didn't crack and then collapse in on itself, because she was sucking all the oxygen from inside.

Suddenly, a loud pop captured my attention. Hanley had finally decided she needed to breathe more than she needed to eat. The sudden lack of suckage caused the nipple to launch from her mouth like a rubber band and fly to the other end of the bottle. Hanley was instantly baptized in soy formula as it gushed from the bottle and onto her face. I was momentarily stunned, but recovered and quickly put down the bottle as soon as I stopped laughing.

I thought she'd cry, but Hanley simply stared through the cereal and soy and seemed to say, What the heck just happened? All day, even though I bathed her, I kept finding grains of cereal in the darndest places. It's been twelve hours, but I bet she still smells like soy. Her face is wicked soft, though.