The Great Utensil Debate

Yesterday at breakfast, Beckett was eating what he's eaten for breakfast pretty much every day for the past 2 years, eggs and yogurt. I've tried varying it. Sometimes there'll be fruit, sometimes the eggs are poached, other times scrambled. Occasionally there's toast. Every now and then on the weekends we'll have pancakes, waffles, or French toast. On a cold day, we'll have oatmeal, but not the instant kind. At times, he'll request cereal, but I'm vehemently (some might say ridiculously) opposed to cereal for breakfast, or any time, really. (I begrudgingly buy it for Dana, but even then I put my foot down on the sugary sweetness of Fruity Pebbles and get her something she likes much less with nuts and whole grains, and very little sugar.) But Beckett always reverts to the standard fare of eggs and yogurt when given the choice.

That morning in particular, Beckett was having difficulty getting his eggs to stay on the fork, in part because of the quirky animal shaped fork he insisted on using and in part because the eggs were ever-so-slightly undercooked. As I watched him persistently try to stab his eggs with his fork, he finally allowed the defeat and asked, "Mama, can you help me 'fork' these eggs?" "Sure," I replied, "but you don't 'fork' food, you put food on your fork." He looks at me, perplexed, and I can tell something thoughtful is about to come out of his mouth. Something I probably can't answer. Here it comes. . . "But, Mama, you can 'spoon' yogurt." Gotcha!

You can indeed 'spoon' yogurt and other foods. Why, then, can't you 'fork' eggs? How come 'spoon' gets the privilege of noun and verb status and 'fork' only gets to be a noun? The English language is often non-sensical. And how on earth do you explain this to a 3 yr. old who knows nothing of nouns and verbs, only associations and parallel applications? It seems completely logical that if you can spoon something you should also be able to fork something. And maybe if I looked in the dictionary, fork can also be a verb, it's just not used in practice.

So, my answer was pathetically, "Yes, you can 'spoon' food. But people just don't say you can 'fork' food." Lame? Yes. Satisfactory? No.

Now, I have a hunch most 3 yr. olds would do one of two things after receiving this answer from their all-knowing parent: 1) get distracted with something much more interesting and forget altogether about the fork/spoon/verb conundrum, or 2) take the answer for what it is and call it a day. Not Beckett. Persistence is his middle name. The kid does not quit until he gets the answer he thinks is right (or gets to do something the way he wants to do it.) Some people say it's because he's smart. I say it's because he wants to cause me tremendous annoyance. For example, on more occasions than I can count, he's thrown a tantrum in the car because I put him in his car seat instead of letting him climb in himself (it only happens this way when he refuses to actually get into his car seat, opting instead to run around the back of the van. I know. I'm cruel.). The tantrums consist of screaming broken record requests to "do it myself" until he falls asleep. Silence for awhile. But if you think that's the end of it, you would be very, very wrong. When we pull into the driveway and he wakes up, the tantrum starts all over again. He will only be satisfied, he tells me, if we go back to the parking lot from whence we came and let him climb into the car seat on his own. That never happens, and yet every car seat tantrum is the same. See what I mean. . . PERSISTENCE!

So, of course, the fork/spoon question lasted most of the day. We revisited them at lunch and dinner, and even while playing "parking lot." By the end of the day, I felt I had engaged in a game of brain Olympics, with my 3 yr. old. I've determined two things from all this: I must either get smarter or learn how to BS better. Either way, there's a lot of work to be done!