Most weekdays I eat breakfast with my kids. But during the week, I’m rushed at breakfast time. This block of time is not only reserved for eating, but also for putting the finishing touches on school lunches, reminding kids to brush their teeth, rounding up books, coats, shoes, signing assignment notebooks and helping to finish the last few “forgotten” math homework problems. It is a rushed experience. We don’t speak much. Our weekday breakfasts are, for lack of a better term, “utilitarian.”
The weekends are a different story. Weekend breakfast is a whole family ordeal that involves eggs, homemade waffles or pancakes and lots of bacon. We sit around and talk for a while, usually about what we want to do that day. But what starts off as a whole family discussion quickly turns into a monologue by First Born. Maybe it goes back to the birth order chart, but our oldest cannot be part of a conversation without taking over entirely. My wife and I have lovingly started to call it “The Breakfast Filibuster.”
What may start off as a conversation about family bike rides and trips to the park soon turns into what she wants for Christmas, a list of her best friends, her favorite school lunches or all of us being reminded for the ten-thousandth time that she once stayed up until 2 am, but her brother and sister DIDN”T GET TO DO THAT!
Unlike the government, no supermajority can defeat a filibuster. In our house, there’s no way to block it, we just sit there and wait it out!
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