No dipping – but *why* not?

Gavriel Zev is eating a baked potato and I bought strawberry milk at the grocery store as a treat for them.  Anyway, when I came back up from doing laundry, he was very nicely, very carefully dipping his potato half into the strawberry milk.

He loves dipping!

Just like Naomi did at that age, I think dipping - in ketchup, veggie dip, etc. - allows babies to "cook" and "customize" their food in a way that must be liberating after a year and a half of having everything served up just the way you're supposed to eat it.

And, of course, this being the Great Age of Experimentation, there's always the chance that something unexpectedly amazing could happen if you dip a potato half in strawberry milk.  Like it could start to fizz, or could turn into a peach, or, really, anything.  Because the world must seem totally random anyway to a 20-month-old.

Anyhow, nothing amazing happened, and then Mean Mama came in and took the milk away after the second time of warning not to dip and told him he could have it when the potato was all gone.  But why?

I mean, if he was taking a bite of the potato, then taking a sip of the milk, I wouldn't have a problem.

Maybe just basic social mores?  No dipping in your beverage... oh, unless it's an Oreo, and the beverage is milk, in which case you can dip with abandon.

Which, by the way, is like the word cleave in that it sometimes means the opposite of itself.  I mean, you are totally not abandoning the behaviour, if you're doing it with abandon.

(and cleave sometimes means to chop in half and sometimes means to bring together, as in a wife saying cleave unto thee or something similarly silly at her wedding)

My mother took the girls to see a big production of Anne of Green Gables last week at the Elgin Theatre.  Naomi Rivka loved it, of course, and is now almost as obsessed with Anne as she is with Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz).  But she insists on calling the venue a "Theodore."  She told Sara she went to the "Theodore."  She's telling everybody she went to the "Theodore"!

I keep pronouncing it deliberately in front of her - "Theatre."  Eventually, I suppose she'll catch on, and then she won't be cute anymore, just big and overly competent like the (other) big kids.

Maybe I should switch to saying "Theodore," too.

Rereading Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss right now… utterly brilliant.  Read it now if you haven’t already!  (though I don’t remember that subtitle - “zero tolerance” sounds awfully heavy-handed, and the book is anything but).