Gluttons for Punishment

Why gluttons for punishment, you ask? Well, for starters, I let Baby B self-feed tonight. And the entree du jour was spaghetti. When you're one-year-old and your hand-eye-coordination rivals that of a blind elephant in an earthquake (of course, then you'd have eye-trunk-coordination, but whatever), eating spaghetti is a slimy mess of noodles and sauce in bodily crevices you didn't even know existed. It is, in fact, possible to get spaghetti in the corners of your eyes, for instance. Who knew?

Further, please note how my son cleverly ate most of his dinner, and left the peas and carrots in a neat little pile on the right hand side of his tray. His spatial awareness is just striking.

So, as if one mess to clean wasn't enough (because it soooo wasn't), I decided that I would continue to enjoy conversation with my husband during dinner by providing Baby B with entertainment of the chocolate variety. Chocolate pudding to be specific.

And it all pretty much went south from there. Literally.

There was pudding running down his arms. Oozing into the top of his diaper. Behind his ears. On his eyelashes. Oh, and there might have been just a little bit on his face.

But it was really fun to watch. And he smelled pretty delicious too.

The making of the mess of the century obviously wasn't the hard part, as spaghetti and pudding probably top the list as two of the most messy foods that a baby could eat without assistance. The clean-up, now that's where things got a little hairy. Er, pudding-y. When I removed that plastic cup from the tight grip of his goopy little hands, the world spiraled into a dark place known to parents as the Vortex of the Tantrum, though it was short-lived as I whisked him immediately out of his chair and into the warm, soapy suds of the bathtub. Baths are apparently the cure for cantankerousness (cantankerosity? cantankerociousness? I don't know, but I just really wanted to use the word cantankerous somewhere.)

After the bath, he immerged a new child, free from chocolate sludge and wormy noodles. Then he waddled around the house in his new jersey, smelling like Dove body wash, and looking far older than his 13-months.

Love, love, love this child. Pudding-y or otherwise.