The milk bottle, "was it all a dream?"; baby-bottling industry

This morning Ivan got his regular Born Free bottle and nipple (with milk gushing out of it). He drank it without a problem. I wondered if he remembered the "real" bottle I gave him last night, or whether the memory of that is fuzzy, like it was part of a cozy "me, me" (his word for milk) dream, where a milk dream fairy appeared with the bottle.

All day today, however, he did cry for "me, me," "me, me." The child should probably eat more and drink less, but we still haven't found a way to force that change.

This afternoon I went to buy new bottle nipples, that is sippy cup tops to replace the ones where the holes have gotten too big. I went to Whole Food of all places. It was the closest store I knew would have the nipples, unlike the two local CVSs which are so poorly stocked (meaning, not stocked at all) with all prerequisite Born Free baby paraphenalia.

So I overpaid for the nipples, a package of two for $6.99. But the new nipples, not yet broken in with the widened holes, worked like a charm when the bed time came.

Baby stuff ain't cheap.

This got me thinking. The whole baby industry--pacifiers, bottles, nipples, sippy cups and the variety of items in between--is quite an industry. I wonder how big and how competitive it is. How many billions of dollars is it worth? (Maybe this is something I should consider buying stock in now that we have some spare extra cash that we could put toward such financial adventures. After all, there is always bound to be some desperate sleep-deprived overworked first-time sucker mom praying to find that perfect product to calm and quiet the baby down, while ensuring his proper physiological and psychological development.)

There are so many "must have" products out there, a 100% sure way to put your baby to sleep, the newest sippy cup with advanced sucking action and spill-proof mechanism built it. I wonder who spends time thinking and developing them.

Someone does, someone with an engineering background, I presume, considering how complex these bottle mechanisms are. ("Yes, I got my mechanical engineering degree from MIT and now I work for Advent, where I develop better and improved baby bottles." Sounds like every budding engineer's dream job.)

Every time I buy a new bottle (sippy cup, sippy cup with a straw, you name it), I've had to read instructions very carefully to figure out how to handle, disassemble and reassamble the bottle considering how many parts the bottle comes in. (And these bottle assembling instructions are on par with Ikea's furniture assembling instructions).

I actually just end up posting "assembly" instructions to the fridge so that we all--Andy and my parents--remember how to assemble the bottle (and still on occasion someone can't remember or forgets to put together all the parts in proper order.)

How many parts does it really take to create a perfect bottle? Does it really make a difference?

But more importantly, how did generations of mothers survive infanthood without all these modern plastic marvels? What did babies suck on to soothe themselves to sleep--a twig or a wooden pacifier--before the plastics industry took off? How did they go to sleep without their prerequisite milk bottle?

I really do wonder about this because it's one of those things that do change with the passage of time but probably no one thinks to record it because it's such a mundate thing (along the lines of how did mothers survive without disposable diapers or how did women get through the month before the advent of sanitary napkins.)

I assume poor mothers and women in developing world still largely go without these must have plastic inventions. I assume their babies grow up just fine.