I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know – the longer you live, the more stuff you accumulate. Me and the wife got together late enough in life that we both had pretty good kitchen set-ups going – most of it hand-me-down, and thus spectacularly mis-matched. When we combined households, some of the stuff went away (my dollar-store Coca-Cola plates – which I’d like to point out, actually matched), some we kept to use for parties (her 30+ 1970s-era crockery-style soup bowls).
When we got married we bought ourselves some everyday silverware and relegated the other pieces to a supplementary drawer to be pulled out when we had a crowd of people over. As you can see, these came in handy when we started feeding the boy real food in the highchair. Since it’s not enough to just eat, he needs to be entertained, he would grab for the feeding spoon, and now we give him a couple of spoons right off the bat. We also have an extra handful at the ready for when he drops one. He doesn’t seem to do much on-purpose dropping (a favorite sport of kids everywhere), he just loses control of them and they fall. And although I’m exaggerating the amount of discarded spoonware above,* after mealtime the floor will have collected about a half a dozen spoons. With multiple meals a day, it can really add up. The silverware basket in the dishwasher fills up in a blink and I have to find new and creative places to cram it in.
* whereas the punchline is something I actually said to the boy.
J – dropping forks preferable to throwing knives. It’s all relative.
Especially if you’re throwing them at relatives.