Booger eggs: breakfast of champions

It's been awhile since I've posted anything--no, the kids didn't overpower me and gain control of the computer. I caught some sort of tuberculosis-like coughing disease last month and couldn't so much as breathe without erupting into a coughing fit. Kindly, Brian spent a few nights sitting up with me till 1 am, making sure I wasn't going to die before he went to bed, preparing hot water in the coffeemaker, and nervously eyeing the phone (biding his time until I instructed him to dial 911, no doubt). After two weeks I finally went to the doctor, had a chest x-ray on which the doctor saw "nothing TOO alarming" (um--it's either clear, or it's not. You may not be alarmed, but I very well might be!) and which looked suspiciously to me like the beginnings of pneumonia, from the looks of the cloudy cotton-ball-like glob toward the bottom of one of my lungs. I don't get sick often, but when I do, watch out. I look like I'm on death's door. The timing was just perfect, too. With every cough while grocery shopping or making a drugstore run for more cough syrup, I scattered dozens of strangers who evidently thought I had swine flu. I'd say it was a nice way to get to the front of the line in a hurry, except for the way my abs felt like I was on my 500th situp with every cough.

So. I recovered nicely from my bout of plague, just in time to be caught up in a whirlwind of end-of-the-school-year activities. Now that my students are done limboing their way through our graduation performance and summer school is underway, I can get back to my normal routine of posting everything my kids do that I think might embarrass them as teenagers or adults. I know I'll want this kind of documentation when I'm having to come up with, say, a wedding toast....

Today's blog-worthy event came early in the day: breakfast. I decided to return to my domesticated roots and cook the kids breakfast for once, instead of growling incoherently into my coffee cup and pointing them in the direction of the cereal. Erin, who loves to cook and as such was clearly born at the wrong point in my life, came running to help. We cracked eggs and stirred, added seasonings, and soon she was standing on a stool while watching me stir the still-goopy egg mixture as it cooked. In true five-year-old girl style, she gave me a running commentary on everything I did: "Mom, look, you're stirring the eggs, right? They're not cooked yet, are they? It would be a little gross if we ate them now, because they'd be kinda drippy on our forks. Look, we need blue and orange fire to make them. Mom, you just stirred them again." Etc. Then came the astute observation, "Mom, you know what it looks like? It looks like stuff from inside our nose. Like we went like THIS (and here she makes a dramatic sneezing motion), and it all landed inside the pan."

The first time I cook a "real" breakfast in at least three months, and my daughter likens it to snot. The boys, knowing what's good for them, complimented my cooking profusely and scarfed it down in about ten seconds. But I'm thinking it's back to foraging for cereal around here--at least for Miss Observant.