Friday Favorites - Mother's Day Edition

My to-do list for the weekend:

- make Si and Helen make appreciation cards for their teachers before we procrastinate so much that it's too late to give them
- clean the house, esp the bathrooms
- pry ant-ridden timbers out of the landscaping and pile them for easy access to the roll-off dumpster we're going to get next weekend
- take Helen to gymnastics, preferably by bike
- go to Si's baseball game on Sat
- run with Si at least once (I've been making him run a mile four or five times a week--separate story)
- do the laundry
- help the kids plant their herb garden
- mow
- water the garden (the peas are coming up! and the carrots and the radishes and the chard!)
- weed
- go to the store
- go for a longish run
- finish a pitch for a magazine story I've been working on
- call our Littleton friends to see if they're still on for Saturday night dinner
- have our Littleton friends over for dinner
- figure what to do for Mother's Day

Note that last item? That's always how this holiday seems for me: one more damn thing to fit in. I'm not opposed to it per se, although I do grade into the camp of it's a holiday invented by card companies to sell more cards. I used to enjoy it, back before we had kids and Mother's Day was an excuse to go with my MIL to a nicer-than-usual brunch place. Sometimes I still feel nostalgia for the old brunch days, but then I remember that this was back in the days when I didn't know what to do with all my time. On Sunday we'd sleep in, laze about staring hungrily at the walls, drag ourselves to the brunch place, wait for hours, cram as much pancakes and French toast into our food-holes as we could, then roll home to laze about for the rest of the day. If I was feeling ambitious I'd go for a run or work in the yard. But the whole brunch thing would mean that the day wouldn't really get started until 1 o'clock or so--which is why brunching has pretty much become a thing of the past. I mean, please. One o'clock? That's like dinnertime, practically.

Anyhow. My five favorite things about NOT going out for brunch:

1. Breakfast takes 15 minutes to make, including the coffee, and I'm done eating in ten.
2. I can eat what I really feel like at breakfastime, which is cereal.
3. I don't spend the next three hours on a carbohydrate-fueled food bonk.
4. I can eat when I'm hungry and move on with my life.
5. No lines.

Cereal: dogfood for people

Man, I love me a bowl of cereal. For years and years, I've had the same formula: cheerios, raisin bran (store brand), rolled oats, almonds, and raisins (more of em). Sometimes I mix it up a little: bananas! Strawberries! Blueberries! I loved Grape Nuts Flakes there for a while, and then we moved to a part of the state that apparently doesn't sell them (whazzup with that, Post Cereals?). Now I'm doing Kix in the mix, although I've gotten to that point in my love affair with a new cereal brand in which I can taste the component parts (Corn meal. Air. Oat flour. Aaand, some sort of synthetic food grade lacquer that makes me think of all the articles I've read on the evils of polydextrose.) I'm guessing the day will come soon when I stand in front of that supermarket display, weigh it, and decide to pass.

Not my cereal habit, though. I'm currently in a phase (known as "having no job to take me away from the pantry") in which I am trying to limit myself to one bowl of cereal a day. Okay, two. But THAT'S IT. It's not really a health thing--processedness aside, cereal isn't the worst thing I could be eating. Yes, it would be nice if I were to substitute produce items for vitamin-enriched wheat products that have been variously mashed, powdered, sprayed, puffed, and packaged, but that's not my main concern. It's more the, um, dog food aspect.

The problem with the dog food aspect? That's also what I like. Complete(ish) nutrition in a bowl! With no more effort than it takes to lift a box! And it's satisfying. When I get in one of my wouldn't-it-be-great-if-we-were-all-Kalahari-Bushmen moods, the one thing that stops me is breakfast. What do hunter-gatherers put in their food hole when they wake up with that low-blood-sugar craving for immediate carbohydrates? Gathered greens? Pine bark? Dried roots? Basically, without the cereal, my own personal food pyramid collapses. I might as well start living on cheetos and beer.

What about you? What's your food staple?