Five Fingers of Scotch

Okay—I’m not too proud of this one; but there’s an explanation.

Meal times with infants can be problematic.

Once they graduate from breast milk or formula to what people mistakenly refer to as solid food (a quick look at the gelatinous glop that passes for baby food will dispel the notion of anything solid), the smiling, enthusiastic little consumer who used to passionately reach for the bottle turns into an alternately sullen or demanding miniature screamer who always wants whatever you don’t have.

Oh sure, there are idyllic moments when the happy, cooing angel “opens wide” for a spoonful of orange mush and blithely swallows it all, opening wide again to show mommy and daddy it’s all gone and she’s ready for another. Parents beam, and then applaud; babies laugh; good feelings permeate the kitchen nook, and all is well in the universe.

Then there are the other moments.

Babies scream, shake their heads, swing wildly at the spoonful of greenish sludge—until their aims improve and the swings become deadly accurate. In between attempts at feeding, Mom and Dad sigh heavily, look at each other in despair, hang their heads, and brace themselves for more attempts.

Average meal times began to lengthen from twenty minutes to close to an hour. Something had to be done.

Enter the era of plausible distractors.

We discovered that shiny things would hold our babies’ attention long enough to shovel in a couple of spoons full of squash, peas, applesauce or pear-raspberry-mango-spinach-ham puree (who comes up with these combinations?).

The first time, my wife just grabbed an empty plastic bowl that was nearby. I didn’t have a bowl, but there was a miniature bottle of Cutty Sark—actually a chocolate facsimile with a tiny drab of actual whiskey, but wrapped in shiny foil and looking just like a scotch bottle—so I handed that to my tiny dinner guest and voila, she ate most of the food before she could get bored with the bottle.

Of course, just like anything else that’s too good to be true, it was…too good that is, and only true the first time. After that, we tried other distractors with varying degrees of success. We didn’t discard the old distractions, though; we just collected them into a giant Tupperware container that we leave on the kitchen table. When meals begin, we try a bite or two commando (sans distractions) but quickly move to the box and work our way through the collection.

 Currently the box contains the following:

·  Two chocolate liquor bottles (we had to replace the originals after they were baby-handled for a few weeks)

·  Three plastic lids

·  Two spoons (“Here, honey, you can feed yourself like a big girl”)

·  Two homemade noisemakers: Clean out the plastic tubs from Gerber Organic Fruits; insert three unshelled almonds; seal top with packing tape; hand to baby.

·  Two more noisemakers—this time with M & M’s instead of almonds.

·  Two bright, pink, plastic pairs of sunglasses

·  Two empty bags of “squeezable” baby food with screw on lids. Caution: keep an eye on the lids, they are almost small enough to consume.

·  A very large building block

·  A smaller, large building block

·  A brochure for a real estate agent

·  A paper cup (okay, not very shiny, but they grabbed it from the bathroom and I left it in there)

·  A plastic telephone receiver

·  Various straws, napkins and cups

Lately they have become so intransigent that nothing in the box works by itself, so I just put the entire tub in front of the baby I’m trying to feed and hope that by the time she empties it on the floor I will have coaxed her into consuming something like a good meal.

That’s when I reach for the real Cutty Sark.