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By Sally Torbey
About this blog: About this blog: I have enjoyed parenting five children in Palo Alto for the past two decades and have opinions about everything to do with parenting kids (and dogs). The goal of my blog is to share the good times and discuss the ...
(More)About this blog: About this blog: I have enjoyed parenting five children in Palo Alto for the past two decades and have opinions about everything to do with parenting kids (and dogs). The goal of my blog is to share the good times and discuss the challenges of having a satisfying family life in a community where parents set a high bar for themselves, their children, and the schools and organizations that educate and socialize them. I grew up in the Midwest, attended a small liberal arts college on the East Coast and graduated from medical school in Chicago. I left a pediatric residency to care for our then infant son and spent the next dozen years contentedly gestating and lactating while having four more children. My husband grew up in the Middle East, came to the US for graduate school and works in high tech. Our eldest son graduated from a UC, and after working in the Middle East for a few years, now attends law school in NYC. Our eldest daughter graduated from a Midwestern Big Ten University and is a journalist in Texas. Our middle child studies engineering at a UC. The youngest two girls are in middle and high school in PAUSD. We are celebrating 20 years as PAUSD parents! I volunteer in the public schools, our church, and scouting.
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Breakfast for dinner
Uploaded: Oct 7, 2015
My daughter's Girl Scout troop enjoys cooking, so an important part of our meetings is preparing and consuming a meal together before we accomplish our other tasks. We meet monthly on a Friday night. At the last meeting it was decided to make breakfast for dinner, because breakfast is really everybody's favorite meal. Thirteen girls cooking together in a home kitchen is at best chaotic, and at worst enticingly dangerous. Between the flaming burners, hot oven and sharp knives it is a wonder that nobody gets hurt! Crowded around four burners, the girls flipped pancakes, grilled French toast, broiled bacon, scrambled eggs, and heated a marshmallow syrup for the fruit salad. What is most remarkable, besides the lack of injuries, is how the results of all this chaos taste pretty good!
Some of the scouts shared that they had enjoyed a breakfast for dinner tradition with their own families, and they reminisced about the dinners of egg sandwiches and pancakes they had when they were younger. I suspect that, like me, their parents made breakfast for dinner when life had become overwhelmingly busy and a grocery run was long overdue. Eggs and bread were the only ingredients in the frig, but were enough to make a satisfying meal on an evening of back-to-back carpools or after a meeting that ran late. We probably made the meal chastising ourselves that we didn't have it together enough to cook a proper supper. Ironically, though, it is not the meal created from extensive planning and preparation but the one made as a last resort that is remembered by the kids as the special occasion!
This is not the first time that I have experienced my kids fondly remembering the simplest of events, while elaborate efforts go unnoticed. I plan to remind myself of this often as the holiday season rapidly approaches!
Democracy.
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