I Am Slowly Returning...

won't be long now. I have in my possession the final few things that I needed to organize the last few areas of the house today. The last few areas have been the closets... you never realize how much you use your closet until you have no pole to hang things on.

I am slowly getting used to this living out of town stuff too. I can tell it will be quite a transition. But we stayed home completely yesterday and everything I ran across that I needed or needed to do I wrote down. Then this morning I gathered all my stuff together, got the kids in the van, had my list, snacks and drinks for all in hand and we set out. Then we went 1/2 a mile down the road and we returned for my cell phone and checkbook. I told you I'm learning.

We are also slowly returning to a meal routine as well. Right now my biggest pain is breakfast. I hate getting up to fix breakfast. I have so many issues with this meal that's adding to the difficulty.

1. Steven is with us at breakfast now. Which is fine. But I had tried to train the kids to wait for breakfast until all children are awake - this would prevent me from cooking/fixing/assembling what seemed like all morning long. Now Steven sits down for his breakfast and the early risers are begging for scraps. So if he feeds them, they then eat at a different time than the later risers... they eat something different than the later risers... and not all the children like what daddy fixes so I can't just hand the job over to him.
   
2. As you could tell in the above dilemma, the kids all wake up at varying times. The younger ones are awake by 6:00. And they pretty much are ready for food immediately. The older ones will sleep until between 7-8 and Huston especially is just not hungry first thing. So that would have me cooking almost 3 different breakfasts spanning a time frame of almost 3 hours. ugh. This non-morning person can't take it.
3. Breakfast never lasts. If the kids eat cereal they are hungry again in less than 2 hours which either pushes lunch up very early or it causes them to want to snack so then I'm fixing breakfast starting at 6 - then snacks as soon as I'm done with the last phase of breakfasts - and then lunch soon after snack - I feel like I never leave the kitchen.

So I'm thinking of things to rectify this terribly frustrating situation. I'm trying to think of protein filled foods that will stick with the kids, helping them to make it to lunch without starvation setting in and will be simple enough that I can just plop it on a plate.

Here's what I got so far. I've tried baked breakfast foods: baked oatmeal, sausage balls, and the like and so far my kids like none of them! Frustrating. Today I mixed up a sausage/egg casserole that I will pop in the oven as soon as the first child wakes up in the morning. This will cause the early risers to wait until the casserole is done in order to eat - pushing them back to eat with the late risers. We'll see how it works.

The other thing that seems to work well is peanut butter something - peanut butter and honey sandwiches or this little recipe that I got through Huston's preschool last fall - banana butter. This is easy to spread on an english muffin or toast and it seems to stick with the kids for awhile.

Banana Butter

2-3 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2- 1 cup of peanut butter (depends on if you like a stronger peanut butter or banana flavor)
cinnamon to taste
it also calls for raisins and coconut flakes... no one in my family is fond of coconut, and if you add the raisins in the initial mixture by the time you use it all they have plumped up to a strange texture so we add these as we eat.

This also makes a pretty good fruit dip.

So anyway - you never knew breakfast could be such an ordeal did you. If you all have any suggestions, I'm all ears. I am hopeful that the phase of the children making their own breakfast is not that far around the corner. *sigh*