Cartier’s sterling baby spoon features an engraved butterfly enclosing the Cartier logo. That little detail renders the $330 utensil just charming enough to pass muster as a novelty item.

But the spoon is, of course, a means of engineering the resonance of childhood as an experience to be unpacked like an old steamer trunk on a rainy day. Like a marker of life’s first phase, an item like this is intended to become a representation of memory, a store-bought symbol of personal depth and meaning which gradually acquires an emotional patina.

It also links the little culinary tool with a series of other Cartier baby-oriented keepsakes-to-be. The litany includes baby blankets as well as other dining implements.