Fun Breakfasts

My children love fun breakfasts. It really is their favorite meal of the day, and I've always worked to make it enjoyable for them, rather than just slapping a box of cereal in front of them. Monkey bread, sweet rolls, homemade doughnuts out of biscuits are all typical fare. When Deanna started school, we started buying pop-tarts, thinking they would be fun for the kids. They liked them for a couple of years, until they discovered Toaster Streudel. Who wants dry old pop-tarts when you can have toaster streudel?

Toaster streudel comes with an individual little packet of frosting for each piece. While the streudel is warm from the toaster, you're supposed to add the frosting. Of course, all the pictures on the commercials and the package show these beautiful rows of frosting. My children, on the other hand, like pictures on their toaster treat.

You have to understand, I don't have an artistic bone in my body. My house is all painted plain Creamy White, the only variation being that the kitchen and bathrooms have semi-gloss and the rest of the house has flat paint. I did get a little adventurous with my bedroom and chose a taupe color that I really love with my oriental comforter. But much of the house has no pictures or any adornment up on the walls, and there's no cute "theme" running through my house (other than "children live here - can ya tell?").

Don comes from a long line of artistic talent. His mother is a concert violist, his father had a career as a Chemist but, on the side, did nature printing. He developed his own technique for printing items from nature and is known as the Thomas Edison of Nature Printing. Two pieces of his work were featured in the Smithsonian Institute (and this is just a hobby that he does in his spare time). My in-laws have a man-made stream and pond in their backyard and a greenhouse. They both can put together in minutes some of the most beautiful, creative arrangements you could ever want to see with fresh flowers from their greenhouse.

Don's paternal grandmother was a painter and the few adornments we do have in our house are mostly oils or watercolors she painted. My mother-in-law's home is full of paintings from her father-in-law and mother-in-law. I believe she also has artists in her family, but I can't remember who.

Don is musically-talented. In addition to directing and writing music for the Handbell Choir, he plays the bass guitar, the piano, the recorder, and played the clarinet in the Symphony Orchestra with his mother and sister while in High School. He has talents I haven't even discovered yet.

The children inherited all this amazing talent (we DO have talent on my side of the family, as well, in my mother and sisters who have a wide-range of impressive talents) and the one member of the family that seems to have missed out on it all is me. I even have trouble getting the Creamy White up on the walls. Artistic, I am not.

So, the children, who have these eyes for great art, would request pictures on their Toaster Streudel. At first, it started with houses with smoke coming out of the chimney. There were pictures of Shrek and renditions of their daddy and I. I wrote their names in cursive on their breakfast. Before long, they wanted more and more ornate decorations and, soon, the half an hour we have for breakfast on school days was entirely taken up with me putting frosting pictures on their toaster streudel.

I knew it was entirely out of hand when Dane asked me one morning for a picture of him surfing in the ocean with the sun setting behind him, a few clouds in the sky, Daelyn sitting on the beach building a sand-castle, and Deanna and I in a sailboat further out on the water waving to him as he surfed. In blue frosting. On a 4 x 2 inch pastry. By a mother who can only draw stick people. In the 5 minutes I had before he had to eat so he wouldn't be late for school.

I managed to accomplish it that one time, purely by the Grace of God, but put an end to the frosting pictures. Now they have wavy, not-so-neat lines going up and down, in an attempt to re-create the inviting picture on the box.

Breakfast lost a little interest for a time, but they still had animal shape pancakes, which I'll tell you about tomorrow.