Our dinner table is the site of many popular activities besides eating:
- replying, “Nothing” when asked what one did at school today,
- dropping food on the floor,
- stubbornly refusing to push up long sleeves and then accidentally dipping the cuffs in a condiment,
- spilling milk with clumsy reaches for the salt and pepper,
- using a straw to make bubbles in milk, which then overflows the glass,
- arguing about who received more or better seconds, and
- critiquing Dad’s decision to eat his dessert first.
Perhaps the oddest popular non-eating activity at the table, though, is insanely speculating about how much of a particular food would be consumed by various small animals. Julia will touch the tine of a fork to her pudding, then show off the tiny bit of pudding and inform us, “This is how much pudding an ant would eat.” Vivi, next door, will then say, “No, some ants are big. THIS is how much they would eat,” and scrape a small crumb of bread up on her spoon. Julia replies by forking up the end of a piece of broccoli: “This is how much a lizard would eat.” Vivi gets that much broccoli to stick to the end of her finger and asks, “Is this how much a bug would eat?”
I don’t know, and my brain hurts from hearing you talk about it.