Mad mouth alert

We were at the polyclinic again today so Sonny could get his jab, and to keep him warm Pa draped a blanket over the little fella's lap. But in less time than it takes to say, "Greedy guts", he was stuffing the cloth snack furiously into his mouth. His arms were working energetically to scrunch the blanket into a nice dumpling shape, the easier to sample with, when Pa snatched the prize away.

Obviously, a new front has opened in the unending parent vs offspring wars. It was bad enough when our four-month-old just liked to suck his thumb (click here for more on these ongoing skirmishes). He still enjoys it, but these days he's widened his chomp-worthy sights to anything he can get his fingers on. These yummies have included:

1) Parental fleshy bits: Our shoulders, our thighs, our elbows - Sonny doesn't discriminate. However we may be holding him, he always finds something he wants to enthusiastically gum at, usually while overflowing with saliva. At the moment, he hasn't a tooth to his name, but this could get a little painful with time, we reckon - though we should also note that, for these illicit mealtimes, our clothes count as part of our body and are part of a standard serving.

2) Cloth: Today's blanket attack was just an especially fanatical example of Sonny's recent appetite for bedsheets, pillow covers, cloth diapers (yawp!) and bolster covers. He doesn't seem to be actually chewing - if anything, there's some sort of bizarre pumping action going on with his cheeks, as though he's blowing up a balloon.

3) Leaving the creme de la creme for last, there's also... Anything dirty: There must be a special radar sense that babies innately have, that enables them to home in on anything that really, really oughtn't be put into the mouth. Today, for instance, it was Pa's backpack strap, which has seen too much action and even managed a worrying colour-change. So, of course, Sonny contorts himself while in Pa's arms and sticks his neck out like a snapping turtle to get a good juicy gulp of the thing. Mmmm, all that encrusted dirt, dissolving in that overflowing saliva... such was 'Today's Special'. If we carried Sonny about the house like a kind of metal detector, we could probably just take note of where he lunges with glee to find the dirtiest spots of our home.

At the moment, we haven't a clue how to stem Sonny's depredations. Fitting him with some sort of mouth guard (a bandanna tied so as to block the passage, say) sounds rather harsh and would probably obstruct breathing. Okay, we jest on that last one. We could, of course, try to keep our house spick and span, with our belongings, clothes and ourselves in immaculate, chompworthy condition.

But since that's too much work, why not blame the baby?