Revving Up Mealtime

"Want truck spoon Mama. Want truck spoon!" Luke, 2, yells from his highchair.

"And what's the magic word we use?" I prompt.

"Peas!" he says.

If only I could get him to eat his peas.

But it has gotten a easier to coax a little more food -- healthy or otherwise -- into his picky little mouth now that I have the "truck" spoon and fork in my fleet of fun flatware. These trusty little utensils by Constructive Eating (www.constructiveeating.com) are sure to motivate the most discriminating of your little wanna-be heavy-equipment operators into at least trying another bite or two off the plate.

The creators of Constructive Eating were inspired by their son's love for anything and everything construction-related. The epiphany hit when he asked them to put cereal on the floor so he could scoop it up in his bulldozer. "What if breakfast, lunch and dinner could become 'rubble'? What if forks, spoons and pushers were 'machines'?" they asked themselves. And a cottage industry was born -- creating construction-based flatware designs for children.

Luke would rather watch a bulldozer than eat (actually, mealtime is so low on his priority list that he'd rather do a lot of things -- like pick up his toys, take a bath, or have his nails clipped -- besides eat) so when I saw the bright yellow-and-black plastic flatware that looks convincingly like a front-end loader and a fork lift, I had to give it a try.

Now neither Luke nor I can imagine taking a bite without our Constructive Eating utensils. The concrete (oatmeal), river rock (peas), and trees (broccoli) just get loaded right onto the construction site (mouth). I've even mastered a few convincing sounds to go along with it. And when it comes to medicine time, forget sugar -- a spoon-shaped front-end loader makes the whole ordeal a lot sweeter.

Now I can't help but wonder if my little builder would succumb to potty training if I had a convincing version of a port-a-potty moved onto our property…