I'm not going to sugarcoat it: weekday mornings in my house are kind of, um, hellish. Trying to make sure two children are fed, clothed, brushed, and deposited to school on time while also managing to feed the cats, make yourself look semi-presentable, and not miss a train feels like running a 5K. Underwater. While a timer ticks down how many seconds of oxygen you have left.

On a good morning, no one cries and you get to keep your job. And yet even on those days I find myself breathless and frazzled on the train to the office, Googling "how to make mornings less stressful."

One technique that pops up again and again—because it works—is to do as many things ahead of time as possible. We always make the girls' lunches and pack up their afterschool snacks the night before. When we're really organized we'll also pick out their clothes the night before to avoid foot-dragging morning discussions about why capri leggings aren't an appropriate choice for a snowy day.

But another frequent time-killer in the mornings is breakfast. One of our children is a morning person: she gets up super early—in a good mood, no less—and knows exactly what she wants for breakfast. The other child, however, likes to stay in bed until the last possible moment, starts every morning by proclaiming that she doesn't want to go to school, and, when asked what she wants for breakfast, spends 10 minutes pouting about the injustice of being forced to decide before reluctantly spitting out her order.

So in an effort to make the breakfast process run more smoothly, I decided to experiment with a written "menu": 6 simple but healthy breakfast options the girls could choose from the night before. That way they'd branch out a bit beyond the cereal or waffle rut they'd each been in for months, and my husband and I could have breakfast ready to go when the late-sleeper woke up. Since the girls have very different taste in breakfast foods (one won't touch eggs but loves oatmeal and yogurt; the other is the reverse), I put a few options on the list for each of them.

The girls' well-rounded, reasonably healthy breakfast options for the week. Too bad I never had enough time to make them!

Photo by Caleb Adams

I had high hopes for this experiment, but it fell short for entirely avoidable reasons.

1) There were too many options on the menu.

Yes, six items are not a huge amount to choose from, especially if you're talking about meals like, say, lunch or dinner. But most people like to eat the same thing every day for breakfast, and as long as your kid isn't digging into a king-sized Twix bar each morning before school, that's okay. They can get more variety in the other meals.

The solution: Offer your kids 2-3 breakfast options at most. And it's okay if they're all a variation of "toast" and "cereal."

2) We often forgot to have the girls fill out their "orders" the night before.

Knowing what they wanted for breakfast the night before was sort of the point of the whole thing, but for some reason it was hard to remember to have the girls write down the orders before bed. On the mornings when we had forgotten, having a menu of clear options to choose from did make the often agonizing breakfast selection process a little easier. But by the time they're both awake and ready to eat, it's too late for me to get a more time-intensive breakfast option like oatmeal or even a smoothie going.

The solution: A different version of the breakfast menu concept that I'm interested in trying next: a breakfast meal plan that I decide on ahead of time, with the kids' input (similar to the dinner meal plan they helped me come up with a few months ago). That would eliminate the whole waiting-for-them-to-decide-what-they-want issue while still allowing them to have a say in what they eat. And having this conversation once a week is a lot easier to squeeze into a busy schedule than doing it nightly.

This coconut milk French toast is delicious. But there is no way it's happening in our house on a weekday.


3) Some of the menu items took too long to prepare.

This is all about knowing your own limits. It may seem ridiculous to say that scrambled eggs and toast is more than I can manage on some mornings, but it's true. The clock is ticking! (Plus, to make good scrambled eggs you need to cook them low and slow, which eats up several precious minutes.) A hard-boiled egg (made ahead of time) and toast, however—that I could handle. If I had pre-cut fruit, I was happy to dole it out alongside a bagel and cream cheese, but sometimes even slicing an apple felt like one step too many.


The solution: Add a couple of simple breakfast items to the weekend meal prep. Making a big batch of oatmeal and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, and cutting up a melon at the beginning of the week is a lot more helpful than presenting my kids with several different breakfast options and making each one from scratch each morning.

Lesson learned: the answer to a problem is never to overcomplicate it. So from now on, I'm banishing any guilt about the girls eating the same thing most mornings. Repetition is a time-honored breakfast tradition for a reason: it gets you to school—and work—on time.