Margaret With A Spoon

(This is an old post, that I’ve been needing to write for a while.  What can I say?  She does cute things with astonishing rapidity).

I’ve been trying to teach Margaret to feed herself with a spoon.  She likes grabbing the spoon from me and smearing food everywhere but her mouth helping me feed her, so I figured we should lay down a tarp and let her have a shot.

Really.  They make floor tarps for baby.  We went for Cars instead of Disney Princesses, because as we’ve discussed before, I’m allergic to Disney Princesses.*

Anyway, I’m not saying that this was an unmitigated success – or even a mitigated success – but I think that we made some strides.

She held the spoon, which is good.

And she got that the spoon went into the bowl.

And she got that you used the spoon to get food from the bowl to the mouth.

She also got (eventually) that the food was supposed to go in the bowl of the spoon, though she was a little fuzzy on how it was meant to get there.

I also learned that it was far easier than I imagined for applesauce to be a finger food.

Margaret also learned that spoons are very useful when you’re trying to get your suction-bottomed bowl up off the tray and put it on your head.**

Eventually, she decided that this whole spoon business was too much, and considered her options.

She then took what seemed to her the most sensible course of action.

*There was a book that came out recently that discusses the inevitability of the princess phase, and I’m fine with that, but when she goes in it, we’re going to start negotiating a marriage for her that is politically and economically advantageous to us.  She can be a princess, but she’s going to be an historically accurate one.

**Because I have lightning-quick reflexes when it comes to preventing my daughter from pouring applesauce on her head, it didn’t actually end up there.