superdumb supervillain: What Table Manners?
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Sunday, August 10, 2008

What Table Manners?

Roo was a fairly neat baby. She still is very picky about how she eats– everything needs to be in the proper place, napkin in lap, etc. Jasper, not so much. I am not sure if it's the gender divide, but he is a perpetual mess-in-motion and that has, sadly, encompassed his eating style, too. He loves food. L-O-V-E-S food. Can't shovel it in fast enough. Almost anything. That is until, suddenly, he decides he's done and then the food goes flying. It makes me want to weep. There is enough post-meal debris around his high chair to make me wish we had a dog. (The cats are usually ambivalent about people food and are useless as clean-up helpers, unlike their canine brethren.) Not surprisingly, going out to eat with this ticking time bomb gives me the willies.

When Roo was a toddler, I would dutifully pick up the stray food that got onto the floor after restaurant meals. With Jasper, I couldn't even begin to try. It would be silly without a broom and dustpan, perhaps even a wet-vac. The kid shovels things into his mouth, averaging about a 70% success rate. He wants desperately to use a fork. But he also gets frustrated pretty easily, so a lot of things get thrown down deliberately, for mocking him. I have tried to distract him with toys or special treats but the outcome is always the same. Enough food on the floor to feed a small army. Gross. I used to watch in horror as families would leave restaurant tables covered in blankets of cheerios and ice cubes and bite-sized morsels of food. And now we've become that family…

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp.

3 comments:

  1. I hear you! Sometimes I think I should bring those disposable mats so I can just roll it up - along with the mess - and throw it away when we're done.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your blog is loved:
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    ReplyDelete

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