To ask where the cutlery is?? (Lighthearted)

[Cantgetbehindtheradiator]

About 3 years ago we lost about 60% of our kid cutlery. Mum had been up for the day looking after the kids, whilst here she helpfully unloaded the dishwasher and a few things ended up in the wrong place but all was accounted for except the cutlery. We never found it. Bought some more stuff, with the kids names on. No further issues.

Untill... September last year when I bought a multipack of cutlery for small hands as we often host playdates now so having multiples is handy. So we had 5 sets of everything.

Fast forward to today and I'm down to one fork and one spoon from the new set (named stuff still there)

Where the hell is it going?! We don't send it out of the house for lunch boxes, the kids eat only at the dining table which is in the kitchen. There's zero reason it's not in this room. How can this have happened twice?!

I'm so confused!

I can only assume aliens with small hands have been beaming it up

Well, this is weird, because something similar happened to me. Although DDs are at Uni now so it was a while back! I bought a set of childrens’ name engraved cutlery for each DD - fork, knife, big spoon, small spoon. Gradually about three items just went missing (washed in dishwasher, never taken out of house for school lunches). Eventually I bought a new set of each, also name engraved, same thing happened a couple of spoons and a fork, nowhere to be found. No other cutlery normal sized cutlery went missing. Weird. Never found them.

Scientists have done the research into this https://www.bmj.com/content/331/7531/1498

It's been thrown in the bin would be my guess. Especially spoons. Pot and spoons get turfed together.

Either that or it's really nice stuff and other parents are nicking it. :)

@Cantgetbehindtheradiator the very same place as all the socks 😁

You're invited to a Sock n spoon party
Date: 31st February
Place: Neverland
Rsvp or miss out on a personalised party bag!

We had this happen when our children were young. We thought we were being oh so responsible by making them clear their own plates and scrape the scraps into the
bin. Until it turned out they were often just chucking the cutlery in too and we had virtually none left.

This is absolute gold! 🤣

Your children are clearing the plates and chucking them in the bin?

Nah they're only 5&3, they do sometimes clear the table but with supervision. Plus all the food waste goes in a separate very small bin, would spot cutlery instantly!!

I think the thief lives in my area as someone on my local freecycle site has posted an offer of lots of assorted cutlery free to collect.

Joking aside, Have you got a compost bin? I have found the odd item of cutlery in our compost bin before. Knives etc. obviously left in with the carrot peelings etc.

Absolutely brilliant!

Do the kids have a play kitchen?

Thanks for posting this, saves me googling. I love how it's written like a proper scientific paper and they've done actual research into the problem.

But I think we still need to know more - someone should do a PhD.

I found several of my great grannies silver teaspoons in the garden once, hammered flat to serve as 'arrowheads' 🤬

They do...and this prompted me to check it! They have wooden play cutlery which is also missing apart from a single fork..

The plot thickens!

Nooooo!!

That’s brilliant 🤣

We had this too over a long while until I caught my youngest posting them through a crack in the floorboards.
Regular cutlery wouldn't have fitted. Lifted the floorboard and it was amazing what was under there.
Not sure if he'd learnt from the older ones or just been extremely efficient in the quantity of stuff he managed to fit through the gap but he was around the same age as your youngest.
I've absolutely no idea why.

All missing cutlery in the Universe is in my DSs room. Or at least that’s how it seems when he has his weekly clear out and brings it all downstairs. I’ll ask him to check for you.