There used to be three breakfasts in our house: my breakfast, my husband’s breakfast, and my daughter’s breakfast. I would have black coffee, something sophisticatedly bran-heavy, and a potpourri of vitamin supplements. My husband leaves the house before he eats, so it’s probably a bacon bap with brown sauce. (Harmonious households aren’t built on judgement!) My daughter grazed waffle bits, finger-mashed banana, and two flings of yogurt. There was a certain equilibrium to the way our family ate, fueling ourselves for our respective days either sitting at a laptop or terrorizing the socket plugs, the crayons, the cat. (My girl will, frankly, trouble anything below knee-level.)
Atop her toddler tower, my daughter—cursed as she is with the cruelly fleeting concentration span allotted to all 15-month-olds—was momentarily captivated by foraging food fragments from an “unbreakable” Mickey Mouse bowl. Initially I found myself stealing a bite, which is normal. We all know parents steal bites of their kid’s food; we can convince ourselves we’re Goldilocks-ing the temperature, checking it’s not arsenic. As the man responsible for stemming the terrorization of the cat, stealing a bite of toddler ban-affle-gurt may be one of the only perks of early-morning parenthood left to me.
Yet as time progressed, and as my daughter’s mind turned to which of the antique rugs she could snot on, I slowly found myself gobbling up her leftovers. And then, two, maybe three weeks ago, I noticed I had stopped making a separate breakfast for myself completely. There was no daughter breakfast and daddy breakfast; the fiber and protein lay un-maxxed in the larder. I was stove-topping black coffee and turning to my own bowl of banana, waffle, and yogurt. Without registering the change, I had become the second toddler at the counter.
I now eat almost exclusively like my daughter. Green peas. Fish fingers. Porridge. Hoops of pasta, tubes of pasta, strings of pasta. Shards of pancake and unassuming crumpet and little cubes of mild cheese. We get through more bananas than the London Zoo.
These are the things you eat after an upset stomach, as you coax back your normal appetite. These are things that come in little piles or coarse purées, or little piles I’ve mashed into coarse purées. Things that can be eaten with one hand, a spoon, sometimes fork, never a knife. Things easily described as something to get in you, something to tide you over until the real meal.
