Self-feeding

The thing about getting kids to eat with a spoon on their own is that there are going to be messes, and you just have to be patient with the messes, and move on. Apparently there is no golden age at which they will be able to use a spoon without having any practice yet without making a mess. Darnit.

We've been kind of reluctant to set Joseph loose with a spoon, preferring to give him finger-foods or feed him ourselves. But we decided it's high time he learn.

Here are some efforts:



The other day I put Joseph in a cute new outfit in the morning and told Todd that he needed to keep it clean all day so that Joseph could wear it to a party that night. Todd did a great job! The key was, to take the outfit off as soon as I left home, and put it back on after dinner.

Still, you can see there has been some improvement:


You might notice that this bib is totally tiny and won't do a great job of keeping Joseph clean. To remedy this, we finally bought some new, bigger bibs the other day. We got an Elmo bib (and Joseph is way into Elmo right now). The problem was that Joseph loved his Elmo bib so much that he did not want to get it messy, so he was intentionally directing food AWAY from the bib. The bib was spotless; Joseph wasn't.