At 15 months, the twins are eating almost exclusively bite-sized finger foods. I make a peanut butter and jam sandwich and cut it into little bites. Cheese, cut into little bites. Fruit, cut into little bites. Dry cereal. Goldfish crackers. Quesadilla, cut into little bites. Fried egg, cut into little bites. Toast, cut into little bites.

I do still spoon-feed them a few things: applesauce, yogurt, and the “vitamin A fruit or vegetable EACH DAY” so firmly demanded by the handout from the doctor’s office, which for some reason I have trouble facing in any other form (carrots, which take so long to cook; cantaloupe, which goes all mushy if you don’t use it quickly; peaches, which are only briefly in season). I have read that other children this age are spoon-feeding themselves, to which I say “Bwah ha ha ha ha! No way.” I am not giving these children a “spoons and mushy stuff” combination until they are DRIVING.

There are a few things I give them whole, and let them take bites of: graham crackers, mostly. They CAN take bites of other things, like sandwiches and bananas, but given the opportunity to do so, they will more often get transfixed by the way those foods mush through their fingers when squeezed. And so in the interests of my sanity, I mostly still cut their food up for them. (See “take so much, a mother can only.”)

They drink milk from sippee cups. If they are allowed to keep the sippee cups on their trays, they will sometimes take sips and then gently put the cup back down until they want another sip. More often, they will wait until I am lulled into thinking they will do this, and then they turn the cups upside down and shake them vigorously until their trays are lakes of milk to be splashed in until milk coats the walls.

I have finally given up on bibs, except in extreme circumstances such as pasta. Both twins would rip their bibs off and fling them to the floor, again and again and again and again and again until I was nearly going mad. I hear my mother-in-law in my head, saying in That Voice, “So they WON, huh?”–but too bad. The twins are tidy eaters. My firstborn practically needed TWO bibs, he was so messy, but these two babies only occasionally get anything on their clothes.

We have two high chairs, side by side. Edward always sits in the one with the seatbelt, because he is the only one of the four children to figure out that he could turn around and then stand up.

Each twin tries to jettison food he/she doesn’t want by putting it on the other twin’s high chair tray. If they are sharing a cup (if, for example, I have only one that’s clean), they will hand it back and forth.

If I’m spoon-feeding them, I use one bowl and one spoon, and I alternate bites between them.

I have to stop myself from feeling as if they have to eat the same amounts of everything. The other night I made them fried eggs and buttered toast. Edward was eating tons of toast and only a little egg; Elizabeth was eating tons of egg and only a little toast. This made me feel agitated, and as if maybe I should start giving Edward only egg and Elizabeth only toast so they’d “even out.” Then I thought about how if either of them were a single baby and eating that way, I wouldn’t give it a thought, and so I continued to offer both twins both foods, but didn’t worry that Edward was favoring the toast and Elizabeth the egg.