Breakfast: Basically the Best Meal Ever

As a freelance writer, I do a lot of research.  This often leads me into weird rabbit holes online—especially when I’m doing research on medical websites.  It turns into this train wreck sort of thing where I immediately convince myself that I’m causing myself and everyone around me to develop cancer because we don’t eat enough green leafy vegetables or flax seed.  (It isn’t really a rational jump, but this is where my brain goes.) 

One of the topics I’ve come across again and again is family mealtime.  Depending on what you’re reading, family mealtime can be attributed to better grades, less drugs, happier kids, healthier kids, college superstars, rocket scientists, etc.  Being an anxious sort of person, I immediately start wondering when the last time we sat down for a peaceful family dinner was.   My husband works an hour away and has an additional part time job.  I work from home and often slap dinner together between answering client emails.  But these are excuses, right?  DON’T I WANT MY KIDS TO BE ROCKET SCIENTISTS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? 

I joke, but it really does weigh on my mind.  We try to do at least one family dinner of sorts a week, even if it means going to a restaurant.  But dinner times just aren’t the best times for me and my busy family—a family that includes a toddler who would rather throw food than discuss how his day went. 

But then I get to thinking… why does it have to be dinner?  It could be lunch, right?  Or breakfast?  Breakfast is more of a comfort meal for me. Breakfast is when you’re still a little bit fuzzy and you might be in your pajamas and you might have bad breath but none of that matters.  Breakfast is when you can have something that really should be a dessert but that doesn’t matter either.  It’s when you watch cartoons and drink coffee and pad around in fuzzy socks.  You eat bacon and waffles and you get syrup on your fingers.

It’s basically the best meal ever, right?

When I think about it, family breakfasts started for me over a decade ago, when my husband (then boyfriend) and I would go to a diner at about 11 am when we woke up (ha, remember those days?) after a night of drinking and dancing.  We’d drink a ton of coffee and order huge, extravagant breakfasts full of grease and reminisce about all the shenanigans from the night before.

Years later, when I was pregnant with my first son, family breakfast meant hauling my big baby bump to a breakfast joint with my best friend every Sunday.  That, more than anything, was my very first mom-and-son tradition. 

Basically, I’m on board with this family mealtime thing—in the mornings. I want my kids to remember breakfast as the best thing ever too!  What does breakfast mean to you?  What are your fond breakfast memories?