Baby Jet’s Milk Formula
by Oliver Carlos
Nothing beats breast milk. It’s natural, it’s God-given. Its nutrients are complete for the nutrition of infants. We advocate it, encourage mothers to continue breastfeeding as long as they can. However, in most cases, there would come a time when mothers would run out of breast milk. Thus, they would shift to using milk formula. These are powdered milk you can buy in grocery stores. Now this is where the advertising battle of milk formulas begins. Certain brands claim that they’re better than the others because they make babies smart, strong, and everything mothers would dream their child to be.
My Mom would tell this story about the brand of milk formula we siblings drank. She said that I’m the luckiest because I’m the only one who got to drink the most expensive milk formula in the market then (that brand begins with the letter S). Since I’m the eldest, they don’t have much to spend on yet at that time, so they were able to afford that high-end milk brand.
As more and more children were added to the Castillo family, the cheaper the milk formula they bought down the line. The family expenses grew bigger and bigger, but the income didn’t necessarily grow proportionately. So, some budgeting had to be done. I’m sure the couples out there who have many kids know what I’m talking about.
Therefore, when our youngest sibling Jay-R had his turn to drink milk formula, he drank the cheapest brand compared to what we his seniors drank. But if you would ask me if the marketing claims of milk formulas were true, I’d say it didn’t work that way for us.
Physically speaking, Jay-R was obviously the heftier and stronger guy. Growing up, he had a nice muscular physique compared to mine. As adults, he’s more athletic than I am, he can run effortlessly 10 kilometers every day. Meanwhile, I’m the skinny one, I’m often the butt of jokes in school and in family gatherings because of my very slender body.
In terms of mental prowess, Jay-R is miles away ahead of me. He’s the ultimate math genius in the family. He has an engineering degree from Mapua and he’s a board passer. His intelligence in math has become his bread and butter and has brought him to a good life abroad. As for me, I fairly understand multiplication, division, percentages, and ratio-and-proportion, but nothing more beyond that. I barely passed MATH014 and I had to go thru a removal exam just to hurdle MATH011. These 2 were the most elementary math subjects in college.
So I guess, it’s not solely a matter of what brand of milk you drank when you were an infant. There are many other factors that play in the growth of an individual, like genes, hard work, interest in the subjects, and the nutrition we had beyond infancy. But just the same, we must still be deliberate in taking care of our health and mind.
The Bible mentioned milk several times. In the Old Testament, the Promised Land was a described as a land flowing with milk and honey. In the New Testament, the author of the book of Hebrews mentioned about the importance of drinking milk as infants, and the challenge of nurturing oneself to go a level higher than milk-drinking.
“For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.” (Hebrews 5:13–14, NLT)
Paul (in 1 Corinthians 3:2) and Peter (in 1 Peter 2:2) admonished the same thing. We must grow up in our faith, graduate from the stage wherein all we take in was milk, and level-up to solid food. God desires to see his children become bigger and stronger. It would be his joy to see us understand bigger Bible lessons, develop spiritual muscle to overcome the temptations that hound us, and triumph over tougher trials in life. All these are possible when we digest more Bible truths, nurturing our spirits the way we nurture our physical bodies with solid food.
Let us not stop reading the Bible. Let us continue craving for God’s word every day. If we do so, one day when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we will be pleased at what we’ll see. God too, will be happy to see that we have grown so big spiritually!
