miguelito
So National Breakfast Month come to an end. I found a lot of stuff about breakfast and health, breakfast from different parts of the world, and different breakfast food. The basic goal of breakfast is to get your motor running before you head out on the highway. You haven’t eaten anything since last night and now you need to get enough fuel to keep you going til noon.
I started and experiment at the start of September. A little background is needed. My 16 year old son Mike has never been two things: a breakfast eater or a good student. I was determined to change both. So I told him, “We are going to get you to eat breakfast. For the next twenty one days, I want you to eat breakfast every day, weekends included.”
“Twenty-one days?! Breakfast turns my stomach. I can’t eat that early,” he complained.
“It’s only three weeks. If you aren’t doing better in school, if you are still getting ill, if we are still fighting in the mornings (and I have tolerated some pretty awful profanity laced tirades because he gets ugly when his is hungry), if nothing changes but September 21, the experiment is over.”
“Twenty-one days to a new habit? What Mom talks about.”
In the past, whatever I put on the table usually went into the garbage. Unless it was Pop-Tarts. He would eat those. If you’ve ever read the nutritional on those and compared them to a Snickers bar, you find the Snickers is probably better for you. Pop-Tarts are candy. Since breakfast was uneaten, I stopped setting it out. Mike’s grades have been miserable the past two years. He’s not lazy or stupid. He’s just seems unmotivated. A change was needed.
So we began. Every morning I made him a real breakfast. Not McDoanlds on the run. Not sugary cereals. ABSOLUTELY NO Pop-Tarts. I made him “Egglish” Muffins, Sausage Griddlies, Pancakes, Waffles, bacon & eggs, porridge from oats or barley or whole grains. He had a good breakfast every day. Fruit too. Milk is still a problem.
His grades, usually in the toilet already, are all Bs and Cs. There are no missing homework assignments. He’s passing tests. He is happy. Nothing succeeds like success. We have not been fighting. He asked me if I thought it was because of the breakfast. “Well, duh!”
On Saturday, I slipped out of the house before anyone was up to go run a 5k race. He and his brother and mom came down to see me run. After the race I asked him if he’d eaten breakfast. “Well, you weren’t there but I had to eat something so I had a Reese’s.” A semi-victory … he had to eat something but he ate crap.
I gotta teach this boy how to fend for himself. How to forage in the back of the fridge. I know there was leftover pizza in there. He didn’t even have to cook, just eat it cold.
A lesson for another day.
