Note: I wrote this post and submitted it a few months ago for the Twin Cities Mom Collective. It’s amazing how much has changed since then. Not only can I assure you that my kids are no longer getting off the bus every day at 4:00 pm (Remember those days? Was it all a dream?), but I am also no longer the President of Breakfast. What had been our normal for many months has, like so many things, been entirely upended in the past three. Also, my kids know what Eggos are now. I don’t know. Here we are. * insert shrug emoji here *
Breakfast used to be my husband’s domain. I don’t like getting up any earlier than I absolutely have to and he enjoys spending time in the morning with the kids, so we settled on this arrangement years ago. But then last fall the school year started and my twins went off to kindergarten, and everything fell apart.
Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. Really what happened is that the school year started and my twins went off to kindergarten and everything fell apart... at 4:00 p.m. each day.
That’s when my twins step off the bus. My youngest wants to play with his siblings who’ve been gone all day. My daughter wants to find a friend to play with because her social bucket apparently needs to be filled, even though she’s just been at school for the past seven hours. Her twin brother needs to go sit in a room with some LEGOs by himself because he’s just been at school for the past seven hours. I want to go through backpacks full of lunch boxes and paperwork and “Mommy look at this!” - all while I also need to start thinking about dinner. Oh, and I am also simultaneously handling three kids clamoring for five different snacks at the same time.
It’s kind of the worst.
Within two weeks of the start of school, I asked my husband to re-arrange his work schedule.
“Is there any way you can start at 7 so you can end at 4?” I asked him one desperate evening. He works from home as a software developer; I knew it was in the realm of possibility. “I can’t be everything to everyone.”
He could. And he did.
But with him now starting at 7:00 a.m. - a full hour earlier - breakfast is now firmly in my domain. I started rising earlier to tackle this task. Instead of using that time to get ready for the day while my husband controls the breakfast chaos downstairs, I wake up earlier to throw myself together so I can take control of it all myself.
I grew up eating toast and cereal and Pop-Tarts and Eggos for breakfast. It was the 90s and this sufficed. Also, my mom isn’t a morning person. I think anything that took 3.42 seconds to unwrap and pop in the toaster was exactly in her weekday morning wheelhouse.
My kids wouldn’t know a Pop-Tart or an Eggo if one popped up in our toaster - those pantry staples from my youth haven’t made it to my own house. But Honey Nut Cheerios and Life cereal are on a regular rotation. Cooking is not my husband’s forte, so cereal became an easy go-to in the morning.
I followed suit after I became the President of Breakfast. Once upon a time, I thought I would be the kind of mom who flipped pancakes and sausages before school and make egg scrambles to fill their bellies with protein. I didn’t factor in the whole I’m-not-a-morning-person part.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.