Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

I swear that song must be rolling through Ash's head full time. You're on the potty? I want to be on the potty! You don't have socks on? I don't want socks on! You're eating with chopsticks? I want to eat with chopsticks! You're loading XXX Dragon Fire Hot Sauce onto your dinner? You had better shake some of that stuff onto my plate woman...

Seriously, he's turned into a copy cat to beat all copy cats, and as much as I love that this usually means he's exploring new things, unfortunately it also sometimes results in messy frustration. You know the kind, when a toddler goes beyond being the squirmy kind of frustrated and moves on to the messy kind, which almost always involves tossing something sticky, spicy, and/or stinky in as many directions as possible. Yum.

Case in point: The chopstick dilemma

We love sushi so tend to frequent Japanese restaurants. The only "problem" is that Ash's tendency to want to do everything EXACTLY as we do means he tries to eat his miso soup with the special spoon and pickup his sweet potato sushi with chopsticks. This is made even more necessary when the sushi chef hand delivers Ashton the special chopsticks which he's made just for him. He uses a paper/rubber band combo that keeps the ends together so that the chopsticks act like tweezers which helps, but we're still definitely in the "practice makes perfect" stage of this endeavor. This inevitably begins an hour long struggle to keep all of his soup from sliding off the spoon into his lap and somehow balance each bite on his chopsticks just long enough to actually take a bite. This is quickly made even more difficult as he discovers the various "dips" on the table that he insists on dipping each bite in first, thereby introducing yet another obstacle between the food and his stomach. Sometimes the food makes it to his mouth, sometimes not, but the scene always ends up sounding something like this:

Mommy: Hey Ash, look at Mommy, Mommy's eating with her hands!
Ash: (Looking at me quizzically) Mommy? Hands?
Mommy: Yeah, and look at Daddy, Daddy's eating with his hands too! Let's all eat with our hands!
Ash: (Noticeably relieved that he can stop trying to figure out how to turn his sticks into a fork) Ashton? Hands?

And then we all proceed to eat our dinner with our hands while mommy remorse's the fact that she just discouraged her child from mastering a task for the sole purpose of reducing mess at the dinner table. Later that night Daddy puts Mommy in timeout where she can think about what she's done.