The Tale of Two Spoons

I have occasional bouts of insomnia. It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t hell-bent on solving every last one of my existential crises. Being alone with your thoughts when you are attempting to figure out the meaning of life and death at three-thirty in the morning is not exactly a party.

When morning rolled around and I was laying in my bed I kept thinking that I sure wished the nanny would hurry up and get here to get my boys ready for school. Sadly, I realized I don’t have a nanny. I’m the nanny. Let’s just say I wasn’t my usual cheerful self (and I’m not a morning person by nature) this morning as I went to get the boys dressed.

We have been trying to lay out Full Speed’s clothes for him the night before and he now proudly dresses himself in the morning. Score one for Mommy! Full Speed dressed himself without a hitch. One dressed, one to go.

Sometimes the transition into morning for little people can be rough especially if they have inherited any of my anti-morning genes. To help ease into the day, I’ll ask T.Puzzle  what he would like to wear. Since Full Speed was already in a Transformers shirt, I asked the obvious, “Would you like to wear Transformers today just like Full Speed’s?”

“No!” he said. He said it with kind of a bad attitude, too.

“Well, Mr. Sunshine what would you like to wear instead?” I asked.

“Optimus Prime!” which sounded more like Optishmush Pribe in two year old slang.

For those of you who do not know, and count yourself lucky to be out of this loop, Optimus Prime is the leader of the Autobots who also happens to be a, … get this, Transformer. So, he won’t wear Transformers because I asked him to, but he’ll wear Optishmush Pribe? I give up little two year old. I give up.

We head downstairs and I get the boys all breakfasted up. They are munching away happily and I prepare to load the dishwasher. I notice in the sink from last night there are two spoons that I didn’t remember using. I thought it was kind of strange.

Last night as I was preparing dinner, a good friend of mine called. I haven’t talked to her in ages and being a stay-at-home Mom I basically hadn’t talked to another adult all day. While it goes against custom because I always sit with my boys during meals at home, I determined that if I ever wanted to make live contact with my friend, I would have to do it while the boys ate. My thinking (I’m so naïve) was that they would be occupied so I could form an actual coherent thought and my friend wouldn’t comment on her concern for my continued rapid decline in brain functioning (she would never say that, she is much too kind).

I get the plates on the table in the kitchen and head to the front of our house to sit in the formal living room (by formal I mean only covered fifty percent by matchbox cars as opposed to the usual one-hundred). I had a good, ten minute run on the phone before Full Speed asked me about the address of his food. What he means is what are the number of bites required of each type of food before he is allowed clearance from the table (i.e. – 5 green beans, 2 pieces of chicken and 3 scoops of potatoes). I gave him the “address”. He did a good job clearing his plate. I went back to my conversation and a couple minutes later, I hear T.Puzzle excuse himself from the table and toss his plate and food in the sink. Normally I’m a stickler for good eating and asking to be excused from the table but I selfishly wanted to finish my phone call.

After the completed call (which was divine by the way) I came in to investigate T.Puzzle’s  plate in the sink. He had eaten 90% of his mashed potatoes and maybe a bite or two of the rest. There was a lovely mound of discarded green beans and chicken that I had to toss in the disposal. Clearly, he is a potato man.

The following morning as I stared at the spoons I realized that while I was on the phone, Full Speed must have taken the initiative to get spoons for the mashed potatoes. I was impressed that he knew where to find them and he did it all on his own. This is big step towards independence and making Mom’s life a little easier. What cracked me up was that of the two spoons, one was a cool, big boy Spider-man spoon and the other was a skinny, green baby spoon. I hadn’t seen the baby spoon in ages. I didn’t even know we still had any like that left.

I looked in the spoon drawer and saw all the other cool, big boys spoons strewn precariously about. While Full Speed was courteous enough to include his brother in his spoon gathering, he made sure the he got a cool spoon for himself and his little brother got a baby spoon. Who knew there was a hierarchy to spoons? Leave it to my Full Speed to figure that one out. And that’s the tale of two spoons.