Mass Casualties at Lunch

My parents did a pretty good job raising us kids (Thanks Mom, Dad), so I tend to rely on much of my experience growing up for parenting style. Plus, it's faster than reading the books, which I don't have time for anyways. But come'on Mom & Dad... I could use a little follow-up in terms of what worked and what didn't -- from an adult perspective. For example, we kids skirted the lights-out bedtime rules by keeping the hallway outside our bedrooms dark. When we saw a crack of light under our bedroom door, we knew the perimeter had been breached and that our own doors were only seconds from opening, too. Flashlights were quickly stowed under the pillows 'til you'd returned to the secret super-cool adult world were you had all the fun after we were forced to go to bed. So, did y'all know we were so insistent on keeping that hallway dark so we could read as late as we wanted... were we allowed to keep our little flashlight game going 'cause at least it kept us in our rooms?

What I'm really getting at here, though, is the mess on my floor. Which I'm blogging about while the dog cleans up. (Pepper's household value has risen dramatically since Jonathan started feeding himself). That little airplane game ... where you put the yucky puree green beans on a spoon and whirled it around our little toddler heads like a plane until the excitement was too much to take and we eagerly opened our little mouths to gobble up the now appealing green mush that was looking for a landing... did that work? Granted, we ate the green beans. But how about a few months down the road? Am I the only parent this has backfired for?

Jonathan is very excited about using a spoon. It's quite cute, really. And, as is the case for just about everything these days, he wants to do it just like Mommy and Daddy. Which means while eating chili (RED chili) today, he was insistent on whirling his airplane spoon, topped with chunky chili passengers, all around his increasingly messy head before eating each bite. Or rather, before licking the spoon, which inevitably landed passenger-less. The casualties were innumerable. I don't think a single chili passenger actually landed in his mouth the entire meal -- and he's actually pretty good at the spoon thing, when the path is a little more direct. Each spoonful toppled off somewhere in the circling pattern before being called in... some hit the table, many hit the floor, and plenty hit any one of the white chairs in a 4 foot radius, since the plane was flying a little fast and reckless. And there was no talking this toddler out of the fact that every spoonful needed to make a minimum of a few passes, complete with airplane noises, around the high chair before being allowed to land.

Dog's about done with his job, but we haven't found a training school that even purports to teach dogs to do laundry, so it's now my turn to complete the clean-up. And I'm thinking we'll have cheese and crackers for snack... much safer, and no airplanes needed.
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Thankfully, there's no photo evidence of the wreck that is the dining room at the moment, but here's a token photo:



If you don't count the Oreo(s?) Jonathan manages to finagle out of David every week at the grocery store, this is about Jonathan's 3rd cookie (to my knowledge), and a much cleaner day in the life of the dining room. He was pretty happy about eating the cookie, but stopped long enough between bites to smile for a picture.