No ifs, no butts

Gradually George's dinners are getting less mushy and more, well, dinnery. The items on his plate now have shapes – little cubes of carrot, small spherical peas, pointy parsnips – all of which get investigated thoroughly. A quick rub with the fingers, a squish of the palm, in the mouth, out the mouth and back in the mouth to finish off.

This makes for lots of fun at dinner times when George must feel more like his job is to entertain rather than to eat nicely and not get in a mess.

"Ref, ref... that was a foul. Look, I'm eating grass here, plain as day!"

It's a different story when it comes to things he shouldn't be putting in his mouth. For some reason these items seem to have access privileges and can forego the requirements of the finger test and the squish test... and that list is growing at an alarming rate:

– Nanna's earrings

– Carpet fluff (any suitable fluff for that matter)

– Clover flowers

– Grass

– A dead beetle

– A cigarette butt (I'll come to that in a minute)

– Car keys

– Daddy's mobile phone

– Sudocrem

– Sand

Luckily, we've managed to divert his little fingers away from his opening mouth before the two dock. Grass and my mobile phone are the tricky ones – grass is unavoidably there when he plays in the garden and my mobile is about the only thing that keeps him still when I have to change his nappy. There is something I've learned, though – even though I lock the keypad, it is still active to make a 999 call and since George got to two 9s the other day I've been keeping it out of reach.

"Dad, Dad... that was a jet. It was up there, plane as day."

Anyway, we decided to meet some friends at the airport to watch the planes come in and go away again – for the children's benefit of course. We didn't stop long, just long enough so that it came close to the boredom threshold but didn't cross it, and George seemed to quite enjoy sitting on the wide ledge and wiping his biscuity fingers across the large windows as the jets landed.

We thought it would be a fairly cheap morning out – it was £1 per adult and free for kids under five – but two hours car parking cost £6.50 and mummy had to rummage in her handbag and purse for some extra change. That's when we put George on the ground next to the pay machine – and that's when he found a cigarette butt.

Well, let's hope that's put him off for life.