the snack trap

one of the great gifts from our baby shower was the snack-trap, a cup with a split silicone lid designed to allow fingers in but keep snacks from falling out. great idea... unless you have a child like ours! the other day, on the way out the door, i put some multigrain cheerios (lightly sweetened but multigrain, so that makes them at least as good as regular cheerios, right?) in bryn's snack-trap and gave it to her for the first time ever. about a mile from the house, i look back in my mirror, and bryn has the whole lid off the cup. but, wonder of wonders, the cup is sitting upright between her leg and the side of the car seat with almost all the cheerios still intact. well, i think, that was probably a fluke, or maybe i didn't put the lid on all the way. so, at the next light, i grab the cup and put the lid back on, double-checking my work. looks good, bryn gets the cup back. another half a mile, and we are on the freeway. i look back again, just as bryn manages to yank the lid off. but the lid doesn't just come off, it pops off, because it takes a lot of force from an 11-month old. so the lid goes one way, the cup goes the other way, and the cheerios go flying EVERYWHERE. now we still have the whole car ride ahead of us, bryn has nothing to entertain her, and she, and my backseat, are covered in sticky bits of multigrain (here's where lightly sweetened is a *really* bad idea) because, of course, before getting the lid off, bryn had been sticking her slobbery fingers in and mangling all the cheerios.

so, as a friend put it, bryn is either: very clever (i bet grandma and grandpa go for this one), very brutish, very impatient or very lazy. whatever it is, she is only allowed to have the snack-trap under close supervision and within arm's reach of me. also because she likes to hold the cup by the lid, thereby pushing in one or two of the flaps, and then dangle it upside down to shake out the contents bit by bit. still, the snack-trap is better than just giving bryn a regular bowl or cup and, hopefully, she will use it as directed when she gets a little older. but i doubt that, for some reason...