Spoons

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the spoons apart.

We go through a lot of spoons in our house.  For one thing, they’re very useful things – you can substitute them for pretty much any other utensil if you work hard enough, but the reverse is not true (ever tried to eat soup with a fork?  It’s … tedious).  And for another, they tend to commit suicide by garbage disposal more often than you’d think.  The life of a spoon must be hard indeed.

So we keep buying new spoons.  New soup spoons.  New teaspoons.  But the old ones hang around too, because they are useful still.  It’s not like they get stale or anything.  Bottom line: there is quite an assortment of spoons in our drawer.

It is my job to keep them in their proper slots.

I’m the dishwasher in our house.  When Kim and I got married, that was the division of chores we made – she did laundry, I did dishes.  It has worked out quite well, in a “not-having-pink-socks” kind of way.  But the bottom line is that when the spoons come out of the dishwasher, it is my task to put them back into the tableware drawer in the right places.

But this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, as there seems to have been rather a creep in the size of spoons in recent years.

The teaspoons that we recently purchased on our last daytrip to IKEA (yes, we do that for fun – IKEA is to Kim what bookstores are to me) are nearly as big as the soup spoons that I had before we got married.  The soup spoons we recently purchased are almost the size of serving utensils.  The serving utensils are the size of gardening implements.  Meanwhile the old teaspoons look like new honey dippers, and at the current rate of depreciation they will soon look like dented butter knives.

What is the purpose of this?

Have our mouths gotten bigger?  I suppose it’s possible – most things about Americans have gotten bigger in the last few decades, with the possible exception of our political morals.  Undertakers had to upgrade the size of caskets a few years back, so I suppose it might make sense that we’d need bigger spoons.

I’m not sure this constitutes progress.

SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!