Comments for The Wooden Spoon

The Wooden Spoon: 05/13/07

Tonight I was going through my huge back-log of photographs to post and found a pair of my favorite Sean photographs. These two captured what turned out to an important moment in his life.

Sean was seven months old and had just started to sit on his own. It was a Sunday so Ian was out doing homework and I was trying to cook. Sean was bored and grumpy. I did what many parents have done, I gave him a few cooking implements to play with: a wooden spoon and a metal bowl. He was enchanted!

For the next bunch of months that wooden spoon and the metal bowl were his. The wooden spoon has a small burn on the handle so it was easy to tell Sean's spoon apart form the others. Most importantly, he could tell them apart and if I tried to use his spoon or even take it away to clean it, he'd protest.

After a while I noticed him mimicking us cooking. He would take his spoon and his bowl and pretend to mix. Skip forward a year when Ian was teaching at night to make up some of the money we burned through while I was unemployed. On those nights that Ian was teaching, I'd have to make dinner for Sean and me. To keep him busy and out of trouble, I started to give him simple tasks to help with the process. He caught on quickly and took an immediate liking to baking.

Whenever Sean and I bake, Sean has to use his spoon. All these years later he still counts the spoon with the burn as his. The poor spoon has a crack too but it's still useable. In all these years of cooking together Sean has learned how to make biscuits, banana bread, brownies, cookies, cupcakes, and from Ian: waffles, pancakes, cornbread, and crepes.

sean