half pint milk bottles…

We used to buy all of our milk at a local dairy. It was hormone free and came in glass bottles. There is just something about buying milk in glass bottles that makes it more fun. We loved buying our milk there. The only bad experience we ever had was the one time at the beginning of our local dairy buying forays when I reminded my husband to hold onto the glass bottles so they didn’t knock into one another. He didn’t. It was August. No amount of steam cleaning, baking soda, vinegar, peroxide, or any of our other attempts to rid the car of the smell worked except for time. Sometimes time does heal all wounds.

When we moved to our current locale, I was sad to discover that I couldn’t jaunt up the road 5 minutes and buy local milk. You can purchase milk in glass bottles at the grocery store, but it just isn’t quite the same as walking into your local dairy. It takes a good hour to get to our nearest dairy. That isn’t a drive I want to regularly make with small children, not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t be cost effective. So, we make do by buying whatever milk we do need from local sources which sell hormone free milk. We generally buy our milk at Costco, but sometimes we treat ourselves to the glass bottles at the grocery store.

Last week we took a tour of the dairy. It is something we have been wanting to do for quite some time, and I decided that we should go ahead and make the hour drive before I had another newborn to contend with. The tour was really nice. My children enjoyed seeing the cows, calves, and learning about the process. My 2 1/2 year old even milked a cow. He was quite happy about it and told me the cow had hairy nipples. He is glad he isn’t a baby cow because he doesn’t think he would like to nurse hairy nipples. We learned all about the processing and asked a lot of questions. It was one of those times that I walked away from the company feeling very good about their business practices.

Of course, we had to purchase some of their fantastic chocolate and root beer milk before leaving. While perusing the farm store, I came across some half pint milk bottles. They are just as thick as any other milk bottles but are the perfect size to use as glasses for the kids. I have been looking for this exact thing for so long. At $19 for 4, I didn’t feel I could justify buying more than that. I went home ecstatic with my find and determined to find something similar online at a better price. To my dismay, I quickly realized that that is a fantastic price. These are old school milk bottles – the kind used in school cafeterias in the 40s and early 50s. My dilemma was whether or not to drive an hour to buy more. Luckily, someone in our attachment parenting group is headed up there in a couple of weeks and offered to transport them for me if I like. I may just take her up on the offer.

The glasses are very similar to these, except that ours say the name of the dairy. They are a perfect size for little hands and feel good to hold. The thick glass is unlikely to break if dropped, and the smooth lip makes them perfect to use as glasses. The kids love drinking out of them.  I, myself, have a stash of glass bottles that I have saved from Tazo iced teas that I like to drink out of. There are no concerns with chemical leaching or the environmental concerns that go with the manufacturing of plastics. There is something much more satisfying about drinking out of glass bottles like these.