Messy Mealtimes

I'm finding life messy lately.  I mean, take a look at the aftermath from tonight's dinner:

As you can likely tell from this photo, most of the mess is from Emma.  The good news is that she is not happy unless she gets her hands on her spoon to feed herself.  The bad news is the dog doesn't like to walk on the kitchen floor so clean-up duty falls to us.

Emma can't really feed herself so we help guide her spoon to her food, scoop the food and then help her guide the spoon to her mouth.  She has a certain spoon that she loves to eat with - it's the pink one on the floor near the empty bag that held the Valentine's tattoos that she is giving to her friends (mealtime bonus:  Emma will clear the table of anything in front of her in 2 seconds flat if we don't do it before her).  The spoon is made by Sassy and we have ONLY ONE.  We had one for a long time before Emma decided she liked it and would only eat from that ONE spoon without crying.  I decided this would not do - we must get a spare.  And so just when I let myself think we need a spare Murphy's Law kicked in and we LOST the one we had.  I'm thinking we must have left it behind at a party over the Christmas holidays.

Emma humored us by eating off her Z-vibe soft spoon a bit but she wasn't too happy with it.  I scoured local stores and the internet to get a spare thinking it would not be a problem.  Turns out this little spoon that I originally purchased at Target is an endangered species.  I finally found one at a Toy Train store (?????) and paid a small fortune to purchase their very last one and have it shipped to us.  If anyone sees a Sassy spoon with two spoon sides and the guards at each end which prevent Emma from putting the spoon too far into her mouth and choking herself by mistake - I think these guards are the main attraction Emma has to this spoon - please pick it up and send it to me and I'll reimburse you for the cost.

I wish I could say this photo is an exception to most of our mealtimes, but it's not.  Progress with feeding is messy business.  Really messy.  Especially when Daddy is helping Emma eat, which is not the case in the above photo.

We are making progress in feeding.  And I'll trade the clean house award for my child progressing on eating any day!