This FD+ORS treatment touches on the following basic issues: setting, materiél, proper frame of mind, use of decoy objects, spooning technique, food detritus clean-up techniques/debates. Included also is an introduction to Baba’s Little Helper, an unpattented device for Object Retrieval.

First, to the setting. Note, in the image above right, that the child is parked at table in a portable baby chair designed for use in restaurants. Floor space is at a premium in a domicile such as ours, in which the kitchen, dining, and living areas all share a room of fairly modest proportions. Dual purpose objects are a must.

The observant among you will have already deduced that when the bairn is away from table, the device can be folded to the size of a tote bag and easily stashed, thereby allowing the space to be REPURPOSED as a Grown-Up Eating Area. Provided, of course, the grown-up is okay with a patina of schmutz covering the table in a baby’s arm length semi-circle.

Any seating device will do for the FD+ORS, of course. This just happens to be ours.

Next, assemble before you and your seated, hungry kid, the following tools:

• actual food for kid
• actual spoon
• DECOY spoon (this is critical)
• moistened little towel/rag thingy with which to wipe face between bites (kid’s face, that is. unless you live in a hot, humid climate, in which perhaps you might prefer to use this on yourself between bites.)

Highly recommended:

• washed tops to baby food jars, or other baby-proof items, hereafter to be referred to as “authorized decoy items” (note: must be authentically part of the food prep/delivery system, as “toys” are shunned and the whole point, after all, is that the little one wants to explore the Real World, not a substitute for it)

Ideally you’ll have at least four items which can be fiddled with and then shoved off the table by the kid like a shuffleboard puck. In one test this afternoon, I found that four fiddlable items bought me between thirty seconds and a full minute between “fetches.” Hey don’t laugh; that’s good.

Now, to the Food Delivery. Whilst feeding, take care to keep food jars or bowls or what have you out of arm’s reach. (The kids’ arms. If they were out of your arm’s reach, that would change the whole ball game.) The image at left is an example of a FEEDING DON’T. The worldly-wise among you know exactly what’s about to happen in that image, and it ain’t pretty.

A FEEDING DO, however, would be to keep authorized decoy objects within (kids) arm’s reach to occupy the kiddle, lest the kiddle direct her/his idle attention to the out-of-reach food jar, and irrevocably fixate on it like it’s the frickin’ Holy Grail. Which you know they will.

The kid will either ram the authorized decoy objects into her/his mouth, or shove them off the table. We’ll get to the shoving later. But the time taken with the ramming buys you time to ram your own food into your own mouth. Do so, but keep one hand (your “wet” hand; see below) ready with the loaded spoon. Wait patiently for intervals between the authorized decoy object ramming. Patience is key here, as it is in soooo, soooo many matters related to child-rearing. They smell impatience on you like dogs smell fear, and their recognition that you’re impatient will rarely, if ever, work in your favor. When the moment avails itself, and the wee mouth is both free of extraneous objects and ajar, positively ZIP the loaded spoon into the mouth. In n’ out with surgical precision and lightening speed, that’s the best. I even scare the beloved when I do this, since I am so painfully slow at almost everything else.

Of course, I should add that most people do the “shovel–swipe,” wherein they first ram the loaded spoon into the ajar baby mouth (with an uptick at the end, agaist the inside of the upper lip, to be sure to deliver the goods and not half-pull them back out again), and then rapidly follow up with a run or two of the spoon along the adorable baby lips to scoop up the extree that will have not made it into the mouth. At first this looked too picky to me, but I have to say now that I’m a convert. If you’re flawless with the in n’ out, though, you only need to do the follow-up swipe once every half-dozen spoonsful.

Now there’s a spirited debate over whether one should wipe the face between bites or after the whole shebang. (This is above and beyond any debate over the “shovel-swipe” technique.) It’s a kind of Ford vs. Chevy, paper vs. plastic kind of thing. People feel strongly. I’ve wavered between both techniques, but am currently favoring the between-bites wipe.

Once, when we were eating with our downstairs family, the Know-It-All-Brother-In-Law’s wife noted how tidy our lil’ peanut was while I was on the job. “See, see how she wipes between bites?” she said to her spouse, with more than a slight tone of accusation in her voice. To which the KIABIL said, “Yeah, well she’s a better dad than me.” I don’t think I am, but I appreciated the props. He’s of the Lather Them Up With An Ear-To-Ear Coating of Food, Then Wipe It Once At The End And Be Done With It school. Many people are; I’d wager most of them are Dads of one ilk or another. It’s a brave row to hoe, and I find I’m just not up to it like I was with kid #1. I think age is bringing out the OCD in me. But that’s another story for another day.

I might also note that parental mental health is greatly abetted by keeping one hand “wet” and another hand “dry.” (A) So you can do something with the “dry” hand like answer the phone or take pictures of your kid, and (B) so you can feel as if you haven’t given your whole entire existence, all the way out to your extremities, over to the bedlam that is life with an infant.

Now to the final flourish of the FD+ORS: the Object Retrieval System. You will inevitably be collecting items on the floor. How, and how many times will you “fetch” them are the only questions. Many parents limit the number of times they will “fetch” a dropped item. Yet this sets everyone up for melodrama, since once s/he’s surpassed the allowed number of drops, the little one will still harbor the desire to explore the exquisite combination of her or his budding motor skills and the properties of gravity. Plus, recall that you want to have some device to buy you time to ram stuff in your own mouth. So in my view the net benefit outweighs this annoyance. When the kiddle’s of an age when s/he understands language, you can draw ominous connections between items purposely dropped from table/high chair during these months to the loss of later perks such as access to the family station wagon on dates, say, or college tuition support. But I think it’s a little to early for that at this stage.

Once your half-dozen decoy items have been littered on the floor around the kid, it’s time for Baba’s Little Helper, the object formerly known as wire coat hanger, demonstrated below in its overhand, sidearm, and underhand applications:

In essence, you are scootching the detritus to within arm’s reach, ensuring you don’t have to move your tired butt off the chair to go pick it up.

A hack on top of this could entail your wrapping a balled up mass of duct tape (though “duck” tape would do too) towards the end of the Baba’s Little Helper. Then you can extend the mealtime fun by wacking the object countless times until you get enough “stick” to be able to pull it up without even having to bend over to pick it up off the floor. The disadvantage here is that, if your brain is anything like mine, the wacking part may be too much fun and distract from the feeding of the child. I would suggest this hack only for those with strong self-discipline.

Et voilá! Simplicity itself. Bon apétit.
Your results may vary.

Time of day: Early afternoon on a Friday; prime time for high-roller weekend travellers.

Characters: The self, the beloved, the bairn. Also: bystanders in line for curbside check-in.

Motivation: Transfer all the paraphernalia out of the vehicle and into some kind of condition which the beloved can shepherd whilst the self skedaddles the vehicle over to long-term parking for the duration of a long weekend in L.A. to visit friends & family. We are close to on time, but cannot afford much in the way of delay.

Relevant backstory: The first time we traveled by airplane — to visit this same berg on the occasion of a friend’s surprise 40th birthday party — we were rookie parents, raggedy with the stress and sorrow of my nephew’s cancer battle. We had precious little experience navigating the wide world with our three-month-old lil’ monkey, and in the airport we felt phenomenally on display as The Lesbian Family. Which, I believe, we were (both a lesbian family and on display). At the security gate we were an old-school slapstick comedy duo, fumbling every object we touched, tangling not just each other, but parts of the security team up in the retracting baby stroller as we feebly attempted to compact it and ram it into the X-ray machine. We did everything this side of placing the infant child on the conveyer belt.

We might have chuckled at all this, except that all the while we were being glared at by some forty to sixty irritated, increasingly late fellow travelers (and, alas, I do not mean “fellow traveler” in the kindly sense of the word; merely in the descriptive sense). Okay, not all forty to sixty of them glared. Just ten or fifteen glared; twenty or thirty of them simply stared. Let us just say it is hard enough being a Hallmark card nuclear family at the security gate of an airport, all physically attractive, white, well-accoutremented, and familiar with the process of shepherding both brood and matériel through the security spanking line. The rest of us will be forgiven if we get a little touchy at the umpteenth long look. Suffice to say that air travel, now with two bairn, felt like a daunting undertaking.

Little pleasure: Goes a little something like this. Upon pulling up to the curb, the beloved and I bolt out of the vehicle and minister to it with the speed and efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew.

• bag #1: removed and stacked neatly along curb!

• bag #2: ditto!

• gorgeous adorable totally well-behaved toddler: plucked from car seat and stacked alongside bags! (note: she is informed, lovingly, to sit tight and not move, and god love her she complies, people! a toddler complies! at the airport!)

• kid car seat: effortlessly removed and stacked alongside adorable toddler! no parts tangled up hopelessly in the seatbelt this time! nosirree!

• gorgeous adorable totally sleeping infant: lifted, intact inside baby seat, and parked alongside other matériel! remains sleeping! no crying or snorting! nosirree!

• baby seat base: miraculously and gracefully unhooked from car, no snags, no cursing under the breath! parked alongside placidly sleeping babe!

and finally,

• totally boss, multi-use, it-does-everything-shy-of-fixing-you-a-latte stroller, removed from the back of the vehicle in its flattened state, and DEPLOYED EFFORTLESSLY on the curb, right in front of a Highly Conventional heterosexual couple who look to hail from one the swanker of the metropolitan area’s suburbs (him: navy blue sport jacket over polo shirt, fancy watch, etc.; her: foundation make-up and suspiciously blonde hair, bauble-ey rings, regulation length & color fingernails, etc.). They appear to be, on the one hand, no strangers to air travel, and on the other, unaccustomed to seeing Lesbians close-up & personal. Especially in this full-blown, familial state.

As we pulled up, I imagined that we would be providing those waiting in the curbside check-in line with some kind of a diversion, what with waiting in line being such a dull undertaking. And as we decant the car, I get that sense that we are, indeed, being watched. When I get to the point of springing the boss stroller into position, I can’t help but notice that the female half of the haute suburban hetero couple is visibly amazed. It is an impressive rig. As a life-long emissary for the Lesbian Nation, I see an opening. (Only a really bad day will keep me from making yet another diplomatic inroad when the opportunity avails itself.)

I drop my sunglasses down my nose and lean over to her. “Pretty spiffy stroller, eh?”

“Y- y- yeah,” she sputters. I can’t tell whether the sputtering is due to breathlessness over the stroller (which would be understandable), or my debonair self (I tend to have that effect on the ladies), or simply the shock of being addressed by a woman whom, moments earlier, she thought was a man cursed with a slightly womanish-looking fanny. Perhaps all of the above.

“Look, you can even spin it like it’s Ginger Rogers!” I commence to cantilever over the stroller and give it a Fred Astaire whirl, and it spins obediently. I resist the urge to squat down and point out more of its myriad convenient features. My first job, at sixteen, was as a clerk in a backpacking store, and I have never lost the love of well-designed gear. Nor, does it seem, have I shaken the impulse to point out sundry design features to interested onlookers. But we are in a hurry.

The haute suburban woman is smiling slightly, amazed either at the stroller’s capacity to do a 360-degree turn on a dime, or at my willingness to demonstrate it. Or at the beauty of our children. Perhaps they’ve been talking about having kids soon. Perhaps they want to, and haven’t been able to thus far. Perhaps all of the above. You don’t know about people. I only glanced at her for a moment or two, but I thought I detected a hint of longing as she eyed the kids.

I flash a smile and pop my eyebrows up and down in a wordless goodbye, and then return to the NASCAR pit crew speed-decanting task. I ask the lil’ monkey whether I can put her in her “sneaky little fort,” which is what we call her lower berth in the stroller. She consents, dreamily proving that in a clutch, she is most certainly her Baba’s daughter.

I park the still-sleeping infant dauphin into his upper berth on the stroller, and plug the diaper bag and the beloved’s purse in their available spots on the rig. The beloved appears at my side, I plant a smooch on her beautiful face, and we corroborate our rendezvous at the gate.

As I steer away from the curb toward the long-term parking lot, I think to myself, “Happy travels to all, and to all a good flight!”