Feeding time at the zoo!

Phrases like that have always jarred with me slightly. It's in the same vein as 'you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps!'. There's just something so not very funny but trying to be that I find vaguely depressing.  But as for the feeding time analogy I've also found it slightly disrespectful, our children are our pride and joy right? We love them with all we have and yet we liken them to animals when they eat. How can we? 

But today I can see why that phrase was coined. I really really can. I am sorry to anyone to whom I have given a look of disdain when that expression has been used. Quite frankly they are right.  It's always been so in our house, but I've always just thought it goes with the territory. If you will have children 18 months apart then what do you expect? The kitchen will never be a beautiful vision of Cath Kidston meets Nigella Lawson, it will always resemble little more than a student digs, with old food on the floor and burnt on detritus on the hob. 

But I mean really. There's only so much regurgitated salami I can pick up off the floor, only so much ketchup I can wash from Tilly's hair and only so much Weetabix I can chip away at on the table (it's like bloody cement that stuff).  When the pasta sauce hits the walls and the yoghurt lands on my top as it's thrown from Tilly's spoon I realise that it is exactly like feeding time at the zoo, only animals are probably better behaved. They are after all grown ups. You don't see the seal chucking his longed-for fish into the audience with disdain because it's not 'cut up in the right way'. The lions don't turn their noses up at the meat because it's got 'brown bits on it'. 

I even looked up 'feeding behaviour issues' in Dr Spock today (the peace, love and childcare chap not the pointy eared one - what would he know?). But the best my trusty expert could do was tell me that 9 month old children like to experiment with throwing their food about. My children are 2 and 4. They are not babies. They should know better. Oh yes this is the real me, the real Mummy. Frankly at their ages they should be getting their food themselves and opening a bottle of wine for me too. When I was a girl I'd eat my charcoal sausages and be grateful.  Blimey kids today eh? 

So I am resigned to my kids wearing their food for the near future. And you know what? You don't have to be mad to live here but it helps.