You can't fool him!

Last night, I scrambled for dinner, and to round things out, decided to include a special item - olive spread on crackers.  I was smart, and divided the spread into two containers, and grabbed a couple of spreaders for each to use. 

Andrew was fascinated by the utensil:  What IS this? he kept asking, until he grasped I was saying "a spreader" and he could say it himself.  All good. 

Until he realized that in my haste, I had grabbed a spreader that had footballs on one end and given the football spreader to Elizabeth!  The horror!  What was I thinking?!  Well, I was thinking where the hell is the other plain spreader, and why is it taking so long to get the spreaders and so I just grabbed what was on top.  Of course, once Andrew saw the football spreader, he wanted it, but that just made Elizabeth clutch it ever tighter.  There was a brief argument, but it actually passed fairly easily and I thought I had dodged a bullet. 

Until I heard Andrew, who has learned faaaarr too much from his big sister, mutter quietly with a tinge of despair, "I hate this spreader." 

Trying to be clever and distracting and taking a page from Rich, I picked up the now-hated spreader and said in a high pitched voice, "oh Andrew, why do you hate me?  I am a good spreader!" 

But he wasn't having any of it - Andrew looked at the spreader suspiciously and rejected it by stating, "it doesn't have a face." 

In the end, though, perhaps it was mission accomplished as I burst out laughing at his logic that since the spreader didn't have a face it couldn't talk, and then Elizabeth also laughed, and finally Andrew laughed too, so that crisis, at least, averted.