To become a father is also to become a finder of lost sippy cups. [This is true, of course, only if the aforementioned paternal parental unit remains present to his familial unit subsequent to parturition of offspring, and does not simply skip town immediately following the act of procreation. –Ed.] Being a father of two children—with a third on the way—I have looked under couches, sniffed through rooms, and otherwise hunted down many a lost sippy cup. Once one has found a lost sippy cup, one must then empty the remaining contents of said sippy cup and place the sippy cup into the dishwasher as quickly as possible, minimizing one's intake of noxious fumes.
Such familiarity with sippy cups and their contents recently triggered the memory of a nursery rhyme taught to me by my dear mother:
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
Apart from leaving with me an unreasonable fear of spiders, my mother's nursery rhyme has left me wondering for most of my life what, exactly, were these mysterious tuffets upon which young girls—who were also mysterious—sat; and what, exactly, were these equally mysterious curds and whey. As it turns out, a tuffet is a stool without legs and without internal storage space, or so say the towering intellects who contribute to Wikipedia. Though I had had a great need to consult a work of reference to learn about tuffets, I needed no such consultation to become intimately familiar with curds and whey—I simply had to have children. [Girls of any age remain mysterious. –Ed.]
As milk spoils, its constituent parts separate. Curds are the coagulated material that remains after spoilage; whey is the liquid that remains. Any milk remaining in a lost sippy cup will spoil and will therefore separate into curds and whey.
And Little Miss Muffet ate this crap.
The towering intellects at Wikipedia suggest that "curds and whey," apart from being a card game, is simply ancient parlance for cottage cheese. Having myself been in the immediate presence of cottage cheese, this hypothesis seems entirely plausible. So plausible in fact, that I have considerable difficulty distinguishing the mushy white stuff packaged as cottage cheese from the mushy white stuff one empties from once-lost-but-now-found sippy cups.
Cottage cheese or spoiled milk? It matters not. A child should be protected from exposure to either one. One wonders where Miss Muffet's parents might have been.
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