Weekend Mornings

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kelloggs.

There are few things I enjoy in life as much as I enjoy Saturday mornings.  Saturday is usually the break in our routine; it is the day when we get to change things up and enjoy relaxing just a little more than usual.  I absolutely refuse to set my alarm clock on Saturday mornings, thus allowing me to enjoy the morning as I wake up to the sound of the birds chirping outside … or my children getting antsy for Monte and I to wake up and making lots of noise to make sure that happens!

Regardless of how or what time we wake, the one thing that is always consistent about Saturdays is that they are our pancake or waffle day!  Monte will start cooking a pan of bacon, as well as the pancakes or waffles for the kids.  Since I am not a pancake fan, as the syrup is too sweet for me, I typically will start my day out with a cup of coffee and help Monte serve breakfast to the kids. 

Having all four kids enjoying breakfast at the same time often causes someone (usually Colin!) to say, “Daaadddddd, I’m ready for my next pancake!” as the next batch is still cooking.  This is one of many sounds that are common in our home on Saturday mornings.  The remaining sounds are those of the newspaper shuffling as the kids read it, slurping of milk and the scraping of forks along plates, as well as the happy chatting of our kids.  Our home is rarely a quiet one, and Saturday mornings are definitely no exception!

Once the kids have finished eating and have put their dishes in the dishwasher, I start cooking breakfast for Monte and me.  Our breakfast usually consists of eggs, bacon (for Monte) and toast.  This is one of my favorite parts of the weekend, as it allows Monte and me to have some quiet time alone while enjoying our breakfast.  Sometimes we will read the paper together and work on the crossword puzzle, and other times we just enjoy each other’s company in silence.  This is the perfect picture of Saturday morning in our home, and I treasure it completely!

Sunday morning seems to bring with it a more mid-week feel, as we are all usually rushing to get ready for church.  Typically, we resort to the easiest breakfast we have on hand: cereal!  I’m thankful for all of the many varieties of cereal that are offered, as it would end up being something that we would easily tire of if it were always the same. 

Our weekend breakfast routine varies from our mid-week routine just slightly; what does your weekend breakfast routine look like?

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Here's the fun part!  With this review, I get to give away a $100 Visa Gift Card to one of you fabulous readers!  It's incredibly simple to enter, and you can have up to two entries.  All you have to do is leave a comment on this post to enter.  To get a second entry, you may either tweet or blog about this post (including a link to the giveaway) and leave a second comment here, including the URL of your tweet or blog.  This giveaway will run from 9:00am PST (11:00am CST) today, Tuesday September 28, 2010 through 5:00pm PST (7:00pm CST) on Monday October 4, 2010.  The winner will be chosen using www.random.org.  To view the official sweepstakes rules, visit www.blogher.com/kelloggs-rules-8.

Make sure to visit the BlogHer Reviewer Round Up page to check out what other bloggers had to say and to take advantage of 23 more chances to win a $100 Visa Gift Card! BlogHer.com Kellogg exclusive offers page.

Mom's Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids' cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients.  To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Quality Mornings

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kelloggs.

I have a secret to tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anybody else, okay?  Okay.  Well, the truth is quality mornings at my house are few and far between.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy having quality time with my kids in the morning, and it’s not that I don’t try to make morning a time for us to enjoy being together; in fact, I think it’s more the fact that we are all in a hurry to get going and to get our day started that keeps us from spending a bit more time together.  Half of us (myself included) are not morning people in the least, while the other half are happily milling about the kitchen, singing a tune or chatting unendingly, which creates a very interesting dynamic in our home!  I guess the quality in our morning is the fact that the non-morning people are able to refrain from yelling at the morning-loving people!

Whatever the case may be, mornings at our house are simply a time when we’re all just starting to function and we’re moving very robotically to get the few tasks on our list accomplished.  My two oldest children wake up the earliest and are usually enjoying breakfast while I’m getting ready for the day.  I think eating breakfast is the part of their morning routine that helps them to wake up, as they are much chattier and louder (often having to be quieted, as their youngest brother is still sleeping) once they’ve finished eating.  Their younger brother, Ellis (our third child), is usually awake and watching cartoons while they’re having breakfast, though on a rare occasion he will come upstairs and eat with them (though he is definitely one of us who needs more time to wake up, so it is truly a very rare occasion!).  Since he and his older brother share a bedroom, he is woken up when the alarm goes off at 6:00am.  We’ve finally got him in a routine of enjoying a little down time in front of the TV when he wakes up before he starts his day; this ensures that he is going to start his day on a much better note, having been given the chance to fully wake up before going through his morning routine, and it guarantees that he won’t wake his youngest brother earlier than necessary!

For my school age children, there is not much time allowed for us to spend together in the mornings, as we are all set in our routine of going from zombies to our happy selves!  Due to this fact, it is often the case that the kids get themselves breakfast in the morning, most frequently enjoying a bowl of cereal, and get out the door to the bus stop.  Thankfully, we are able to make up for our mornings before bed, as evenings are often filled with family time and each of our kids still gets tucked into bed with hugs and “I love you’s”.  For now, this quality time is perfect for our family.

When is the best time for you to find the quality time we all need?

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Here's the fun part!  With this review, I get to give away a $100 Visa Gift Card to one of you fabulous readers!  It's incredibly simple to enter, and you can have up to two entries.  All you have to do is leave a comment on this post to enter.  To get a second entry, you may either tweet or blog about this post (including a link to the giveaway) and leave a second comment here, including the URL of your tweet or blog.  This giveaway will run from 9:00am PST (11:00am CST) today, Tuesday September 21, 2010 through 5:00pm PST (7:00pm CST) on Monday September 27, 2010.  The winner will be chosen using www.random.org.  To view the official sweepstakes rules, visit www.blogher.com/kelloggs-rules-7.

Make sure to visit the BlogHer Reviewer Round Up page to check out what other bloggers had to say and to take advantage of 23 more chances to win a $100 Visa Gift Card! BlogHer.com Kellogg exclusive offers page.

Mom's Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids' cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients.  To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Week Six Winner

Congratulations to LAMusing who is this week's $100 Visa Gift Card winner!  I have forwarded your information onto BlogHer and they will be contacting you soon!

Back To School

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kelloggs.

It’s not uncommon during this time of year to hear kids say how much they are not excited to be going back to school, while their moms quietly whisper how excited they are for their kids to be back to their school routine.  No matter which side of the matter you’re on, the fact is that it has happened: our children are back in school and we’ve got a new routine to manage.  While I’m certain there are moms out there who are cool, calm and collected about their new routine, I, for one, am not one of them!  In fact, during the beginning of the school year, as I’m adapting to my new routine, I’m feeling a LOT like this:

It seems, in my house, that no matter how prepared we feel for the start of the school year, there’s still a lot of last minute, “Oh No!” sort of moments when we realize that we’ve forgotten to do something rather important!  Unfortunately, sometimes that important thing is allowing ourselves enough time to eat breakfast.  You see, my children start the day off at different times, as the middle school starts an hour earlier than the elementary, so Claire and Iain are off on the bus an hour and fifteen minutes before Ellis gets on; on top of that, Colin doesn’t go to preschool until the afternoon, so my focus is to keep everybody quiet so he can get a little bit of extra sleep during those early morning hours.  Due to this mayhem in our schedule, there are some mornings where breakfast is an extremely easy thing, and some mornings where we’re grabbing something on the go and shoveling it in our mouths as quickly as possible! 

In the midst of making sure everybody has their homework, band instruments, books, hats/gloves/scarves, lunches and the kitchen sink whatever else they may have forgotten, breakfast is typically one of the things that the kids take care of themselves.  It’s no secret that we all love our sleep, which means that we may have hit our snooze buttons a few too many times in the morning, causing a rush in our schedule.  This rush makes breakfast sometimes feel a little busy and overwhelming, but thankfully we are able to manage through it!  Like most days, cereal is one of our best friends in the morning and, due to the size of our family, we always have a LOT of it on hand!  We all enjoy a large variety in our breakfast choices, so it’s not uncommon that there are five or six different cereals in our pantry to choose from, whether it be Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, Corn Flakes, Crispix or one of the other great cereals we love!  It’s no secret that cereal is one of those great things that can be enjoyed while you’re still “zombified” in the morning and you’re still trying to wake up! 

The catch, as I previously mentioned, is that we don’t always allow ourselves the time that we need to sit down and enjoy our breakfast.  Some mornings truly are more chaotic than others; these are the mornings that I throw an apple in the kids’ backpacks and toast a couple of Pop Tarts or Eggo Waffles with chocolate chips for them to munch on while they’re waiting at the bus stop.  While I would never make rushing through breakfast a regular part of our routine, I think my kids secretly love this day because they get to have something new and they don’t have to be sitting at our dining room table to enjoy it! 

Indeed, the start of the school year has our family in a bit of chaos, but I know that the chaos will slow down and we will find a regular routine to follow.  Do you have a routine that you follow, or a trick that works well for you to make your morning a bit easier?  Let me know!

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Here's the fun part!  With this review, I get to give away a $100 Visa Gift Card to one of you fabulous readers!  It's incredibly simple to enter, and you can have up to two entries.  All you have to do is leave a comment on this post to enter.  To get a second entry, you may either tweet or blog about this post (including a link to the giveaway) and leave a second comment here, including the URL of your tweet or blog.  This giveaway will run from 9:00am PST (11:00am CST) today, Tuesday September 14, 2010 through 5:00pm PST (7:00pm CST) on Monday September 20, 2010.  The winner will be chosen using www.random.org.  To view the official sweepstakes rules, visit www.blogher.com/kelloggs-rules-6.

Make sure to visit the BlogHer Reviewer Round Up page to check out what other bloggers had to say and to take advantage of 23 more chances to win a $100 Visa Gift Card! BlogHer.com Kellogg exclusive offers page.

Mom's Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids' cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients.  To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Week Five Winner!

The winner of this week's $100 Visa Gift Card is daleo1126!  Congratulations!  I have forwarded your information onto BlogHer and they will be contacting you soon.

Top Summer Activities

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kelloggs.

Looking back over our summer it amazes me how, on one hand it flew by so incredibly quickly, while on the other hand the moments seemed to drag on forever and ever!  While I am more than happy to be going back to a more regular routine with our kids, there are some moments this summer that have been completely fabulous and our summer wouldn’t have been the same without them.  On the very top of this list are the two different camping trips our family took, one to Itasca State Park and the other to Lake Carlos State Park. 

When we were first married, Monte and I had talked about how much fun we both had as kids when we took various camping trips with our families.  We also said that we wanted to make camping a regular part of our family routine, as it is something that we knew our kids would thoroughly enjoy.  Unfortunately, our first summer as a married couple and a new family was so chaotic and busy, we never ended up taking a camping trip.  We are so thrilled that we remedied that this year with two separate trips and we already have next year’s camping trips in the making!

One thing we’ve found to be extremely necessary with camping is to make sure that all of our meals are planned out and appropriately packed before we leave.  By now, it’s no secret that we are a cereal-loving family, and that doesn’t change when we’re camping!  We love that we can pack a gallon of milk in the cooler and have a relatively easy breakfast with the most difficult part being having to choose out which cereal we’re going to eat!  We usually bring along two different options of cereal, both of those almost always being Special K with Red Berries and Frosted Flakes.  There’s just something about enjoying cereal in the screened tent with the morning breeze that makes me smile and want to never stop camping, even when we have a new baby with us (though we will certainly wait until summer to take the newest bundle of joy out in our tent)!

Don't you think our new baby will enjoy sharing this room in the tent with me and Monte?!

Camping tops the list of summer activities that our family did, what activities top your list? 

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Here's the fun part!  With this review, I get to give away a $100 Visa Gift Card to one of you fabulous readers!  It's incredibly simple to enter, and you can have up to two entries.  All you have to do is leave a comment on this post to enter.  To get a second entry, you may either tweet or blog about this post (including a link to the giveaway) and leave a second comment here, including the URL of your tweet or blog.  This giveaway will run from 9:00am PST (11:00am CST) today, Tuesday September 7, 2010 through 5:00pm PST (7:00pm CST) on Monday September 13, 2010.  The winner will be chosen using www.random.org.  To view the official sweepstakes rules, visit www.blogher.com/kelloggs-rules-5.

Make sure to visit the BlogHer Reviewer Round Up page to check out what other bloggers had to say and to take advantage of 23 more chances to win a $100 Visa Gift Card! BlogHer.com Kellogg exclusive offers page.

Mom's Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids' cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients.  To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Week Four Winner!

Congratulations to Katie who enjoys eating cereal for breakfast when she's in a hurry - you are this week's $100 Visa Gift Card winner!  I have forwarded your contact information onto the fabulous people at BlogHer and they will be contacting you to find out where to send the card.  Thanks for participating - keep playing along, there's another post coming in just a few hours!