What Exactly is a Spoon For?

Being on a family vacation and eating in restaurants during almost every meal gives me the ability to spend much more time watching my two boys' table manners - I'm not cooking and doing kitchen duty, so I have much more time to watch what they're doing.  The crazy thing is that I realized I became obsessed this week with a most mundane thing - the Spoon!

At one point, one of my boys ordered spaghetti, and a spoon arrived in his bowl of pasta.  The next thing I saw was my son trying to eat spaghetti with the spoon!  When I asked what he thought he was doing (quietly), he told me that a spoon had arrived in his bowl, so he assumed that he was supposed to use it to eat the dish.  So, I immediately reminded him about our placemats which teach "Twirl your pasta with your fork on a spoon" to make it bite-sized.  When he realized what I was talking about, he knew exactly what to do....but seeing him trying to initially eat spaghetti with a spoon cracked me up!

Duke Girls Search Austin for Best Manners

I spent this weekend in Austin visiting a college friend with five of my other Duke girlfriends. We happened upon a situation which we unanimously voted as "the best manners we encountered all weekend".

It's hard to accept a compliment, isn't it?  But once a day, or once a week, we're paid a compliment and what do we do?  We say, "Oh, not really....." or  "Thank you,

but.......".   The appropriate way to

accept a compliment is to do so with the same kindness used to give you the compliment. Accept it Graciously.

Here's our story:

We were in a very large dressing room - in a kind of

Breaking Bread

A short posting this week.

Some technical glitches came up with printing the first run of the lovelymanners placemats this weekend.  I want them to be PERFECT, so I pulled the job late Saturday night and will continue once we figure out how to fix what was going on.  A great Saturday night I had I have to say -  sitting in a room at a printing company in North Carolina!  I had plenty of time to proofread our copy again for the umpteenth time, and reading one of our manners reminded me of something I had seen earlier in the weekend.

When you are out in a restaurant - or even at home - do you