Do your days follow a pattern like this?
And then you open up the cupboard to see a dozen cold cereal boxes staring at you. Cold cereal! Voila! Just plop it in a bowl, pour some milk and the kids are ready to rumble! Inspiration has, indeed, hit.
Unless you're me.
If you're Juliana, you open up that cupboard and see the cereal laughing menancingly down at you. It's screaming, "You'll HAVE to serve us today! There just isn't time for anything else! Mwahahaha!" So you grumble and murmur and complain and frown until the kids stumble into the room when you say cheerfully, "Look! Cold cereal for breakfast!!" The kids cheer. They clamber to the table and then it happens.
It always happens! Why me?!?
Things are okay at first, but then it starts with a child leaning across the table. Down goes the cereal bowl, bits of mush and artificial flavoring splattering the hardwood floor. The child starts screaming hysterically. You rush around, trying to decide which is more urgent: the screaming child or the hardwood floor that is slowly soaking up all that icky, sticky, ooey, gooey yuck.
The decision doesn't matter because the screaming child cranks the anxiety level in the room way up until another child inevitably follows form. This time, if you're lucky, the cereal bowl dumps forward onto the table instead of the floor. Phew. But then child #2 gets playful (instead of angry) and plops his tummy onto the table and waves his arms about, gracefully splattering milk and dried bits of Cheerios onto the floor, walls and .... you.
The positive side note to this is that inevitably child #1 will stop crying and start giggling. The downside to the giggling is that child #1 will always ape child #2. This will start spiraling out of control, and you can hear the boxes of cereal laughing at you derisively and uncontrollably.
The children scream and cry and giggle their way through the end of this debacle until you are ready to faint in exhaustion.
Then you look at the clock: 7:37 a.m. This is not the way to start the day right.
Yes, those boxes absolutely know they have a monopoly on your morning when you are even slightly unprepared. One day you will have kids old enough to pour their own milk and engage in reasonably mature conversation. That really is nice, along with them learning to buckle themselves in in the car, etc. But until then, enjoy those little guys and all of the spilled milk that comes with them. It goes so fast.
ReplyDeletehe he he! I never let my kids eat cearel unless they are still in their PJ's, because I knwo it is impossible to eat without spilling
ReplyDeleteMy wife gives them a bowl of dry cereal and a slow drip sippy cup. Her idea is, if it's dry then it's not as hard to clean up and as long as the milk and the cereal end up in their bellies then everyone wins.
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