The Chocolate Spoon

When I was a freshman in college in 1994, I got care packages from my mom a couple of times a month. Cookies, cards, pictures and trinkets were always a part of the mix and one time I got an extra-special treat -- a bunch of chocolate-dipped spoons! I loved these things, as they released just the right amount of chocolate in your coffee as you stirred it with the spoon. Definitely one of man's greater inventions.



I used just about all of the spoons and enjoyed them immensely. I got down to my last one, though, and decided to save it. You know -- for that perfect, cold day cup o' joe. It was worth waiting for.

So the spoon stuck around for the rest of my freshman year. It also stuck around for my sophomore, junior and senior years. I just never found the right "time" to use the spoon.

Around that time, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and I clung to everything she gave me, knowing that care packages and trinkets from my mom were things of the past.

So the spoon stayed on through college and moved to my first apartment. Two years after graduating, I bought a condo and the spoon moved to the condo with me. Two-and-a-half years after that, Todd and I got married and moved to San Antonio. My mom died a little more than a year after moving into our current home and I just couldn't bear to throw the spoon out. That chocolate-dipped utensil has sat in our silverware drawer for more than six years now.

Until today.

While I was on the phone with a friend of mine with whom I needed to do some major catching up, I turned my back on the twins, knowing they would amuse themselves with baby dolls and other such notions. I watched them carefully enough to pluck them from the kitchen table a few times and break up a fight over a pacifier, but didn't pay much attention as they started rifling through the drawers I allow them to rifle through.

But when Grace toddled into the living room with a huge hunk of chocolate, I knew immediately what had happened. My mom's spoon -- 14 years in the making -- was being devoured by two little devils in my very own kitchen.

I didn't cry. Actually, I laughed. Th whole thing is pretty silly and it was just my obsessive-compulsive personality that made me keep the spoon for more than a decade. I knew my mom was laughing hysterically up in Heaven, watching my girls get chocolate all over themselves and laughing at me for holding onto something so inconsequential.

But the whole thing did raise one very important question:

Is 14-year-old chocolate bad for babies?

The answer to that question will be in the next 24 hour's diapers.