Baby sleeps until next feeding (being full).
I didn't recognize the baby. Who could? He wasn't my child or anybody else's. He was the pediatrician's pipe-dream child.
I looked at it another way: if the baby slept except when being fed, when did it get the baths, orange juice, vitamins, cereal, and everything else the pediatricians prescribed?
Hoist by their own petards!
The fifth type of mis-statement was the impossible ideal. I tried this one for logic: "Babies should not be allowed to cry before feeding."[2]
Had those doctors ever tried to keep a hungry child from crying?
Hungry children cried. It was their nature. Some of them—my kind for instance—cried very hard. And children—even pipe-dream children—woke up hungry.
Warming a bottle to drinkable temperature took time, at least five minutes and sometimes ten. Meanwhile, in spite of everything that anyone could do, the baby was crying. He would not he cajoled, walked, teased, patted, jollied, scolded, or argued into accepting any substitute for his formula. With him, it was food or nothing.
For horror, I had a favorite scene: the mother alone, rushing from baby to bottle, from bottle to baby, one screaming, the other cold, frantic with the pediatrician's admonitions, and then both too hot....
I would not have had it on my conscience for all the royalties in America! At least I have saved the world that.