We are at our usual halfway point of starting out the New Year sticking to a weekly family menu.
Each year, we do our collective household New Year’s resolution that, during the week, we will eat healthy, eat at home and shop wisely. (We can schedule in a restaurant or a guilty-pleasure meal on the weekends. For what it’s worth, my son and I both share the same favorite guilty-pleasure meal – gas station hot dog. You say it’s awful? I say it’s awfully delicious!)
Three years ago, I had one of the toughest break-ups of my life. And it’s never easy to break up with your oatmeal, especially when you’ve been together for more than 30 years.
You see, for most of my life, I have eaten Quaker Instant Oatmeal (maple and brown sugar flavor only) for breakfast. Sure, we do the occasional weekend bacon and eggs or waffle breakfasts, but the instant oatmeal was my go-to staple. But then, something changed. As I wrote back in 2011:
So my family was at a restaurant the other night. We were situated in a booth, strategically arranged as usual so that (a) my two left-handed kids had free reign to swing their eatin’ arms and (b) there was no brother-sister under-the-table leg kicking capability. (Team Gibbons getting situated at dinner often looks like a well-choreographed dance. We’re fun that way.)
When the zombies attack, I’m sticking with my daughter.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Aww, what a super awesome dad who will be protective over his baby girl.”
To which I say, “Um, yeah, that.”
As 2014 dawns on us, it is time we band together to do all those things in the upcoming year to make our society the greatest the world have ever known. And it will only take a few quick tweaks of our current ways of being to make that dream a reality. Thus, this year, as a society, we shall resolve to do these things: