Mine only ever abandoned his cutlery once. In an Italian restaurant, where he scooped up his spag bol and smeared it into his angelic face. The look on my mother's face still makes me laugh.
Before uni, and between most years at uni, I volunteered on a rare breeds near-organic farm in the south of France where as well as shepherdessing, gardening, hay-making, livestock-feeding etc I also lent a hand with looking after the farm brats, and took on most of the cooking of the household - which I later discovered fair terrified the in some ways very trad French farmer when I first offered the first time I visited, although my repeat visits after that first summer were greeted with gleeful rejoicing once they all discovered I'm a decent enough cook, and prepared to spend the hours it takes to make triple fried chips for a up to a dozen hungry people's dinner when the hens were being very productive so I did regular egg, chips and mayo for tea.
One day I made a lentil spag bol (because lentils are cheap and I had a wheelbarrow full of ripe toms to use that day) and gave a portion to the at-the-time smallest farm brat, who was just about toddling then, for tea.
Cleaning up the resulting mess from the child/table/floor I made myself a promise that never again would I feed spagbol to a child under the age of three.
There's photographic evidence somewhere of the time I forgot that promise to myself when the EldestCub was small....
