This is the way of an adulteress:  She eats and wipes her mouth and says, "I've done nothing wrong."

My youngest son, Cor, is an absolute mess when it comes to meal-times.  I suppose it's just a part of being three years old, but he seems to take extra-special delight in the potential for messiness expressed in a simple peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.  Whenever he gets his lunch, he immediately opens up the sandwich, scrapes his fingers across the inner surface where all the peanut butter and jelly (his favorites) are mixed together, and then proceeds to interact with the sandwich elements as if they were play-things.  He'll take two fingerfuls of goop and hold his hand up in front of him in the shape of the letter "C," singing the classic Cookie Monster song "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me" and then smearing the goop into his face while making maniacal eating sounds just like Cookie Monster does on the video.  He'll draw criss-cross patterns across the inside of the sandwich, carving out channels of peanut butter like the trenches across Belgium in the First World War.  He'll get peanut butter and jelly all down the front of his shirt, and even up in his hair.  Like I said, he is an absolute mess when it comes to mealtimes.

Because of these tendencies, we've created a rule for lunchtime.  Cor absolutely must stay at the table until he is completely finished with his lunch -- or else he will have his lunch taken away immediately and be promptly put into a time-out.  When he's finished with his lunch, he can ask for help to get down and wash his hands.  And that's the way that it works most of the time.  We've decided that it's OK for him to have a little fun with his lunch and make a bit of a mess (It's just because he's three, going through a phase that both of our other children seemed to experience at one point or another.  Don't worry:  if he's still doing the same thing by the time he's in junior high, we'll make sure to deal with it more aggressively!).  But we're NOT OK if that mess extends ANYWHERE beyond his place at the table.  Containment is our policy, I guess you could say.  For the most part, it seems to work out pretty well for us.

Every now and then, we'll have to do the take-away-the-lunch and time-out thing because he's tried getting down and running around on his own.  But one day, I was home alone with Cor over the lunch-hour -- and I got caught up in some project at the computer.  I was totally absorbed.  Totally out of it.  So I didn't see Cor get down from his place at the table.  I didn't notice him as he played in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and his bedroom.  I didn't notice any of his activity at all, until some moment when I looked up from my work and noticed a very distinctive, very small handprint on the side of the living room couch.  I glanced to the table, and it immediately registered that Cor had gotten down without my help and was currently on the loose... with his peanut-butter hands, peanut-butter shirt, and peanut-butter hair.  I immediately went and located him in his room, and sure enough:  he had been making himself quite busy with quite a bit of messiness on his hands, face, and clothing.  When I called his name from directly behind him, a hint of sternness in my voice, he started a bit and then immediately turned the corners of his mouth in a bit of a guilty smile.

"Cor," I said, "Did you get down from the table without Daddy's help?"

"Ahhh... No."  He shook his head emphatically, over-exagerated, and looked down at the carpet where another glob of peanut butter and jelly was smeared into the floor of his room.

"Cor, look at your hands.  Look at the carpet."  I brought him out into the living room, discovering several other spots of evidence along the way.  I pointed these little smudges and stains out to him and told him that it looked to me like he had been playing around the house without having washed his hands after lunch.  In all fairness, I realized that I may have been working too hard to hear any request that he might have made for being helped -- but since he wasn't owning up to the fact that he had made a mess of the house, I held my line and said, "Cor, I think you got down from the table without Daddy's help."

"Nuh-uh," said Cor, shaking his head again like a dog after a bath.  "I just trying..." his voice trailed off.  He looked at the ground again and then back up at my disapproving face. "Not my fault.  Nothin' wrong.  It's OK," he said, in a reassuring voice, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing an imaginative paisley pattern of peanut butter and jelly onto his face.

I didn't know whether to laugh, or cry, or scold.  But in the end, I laughed.  He may know how to make a mess around the house, but he's no home-wrecker.