the bread of life

Monday, January 29, 2007

I was recalling this story recently to some friends at work, and I thought I would share with the rest of my readers.

About a month ago, the kids awoke early one morning, and by early I mean about 530 in the morning. I have no idea why they woke up so early, I can only imagine they somehow sensed my great desire to sleep in on my day off and wanted to see my reaction at being awoken much earlier than normal.
Anyways, they came into my room and of course wanted to know if it was "wake up time", code for "is Mommy going to drag herself out of bed?". The answer, of course, was a resounding NO.
I offered to allow them to lay in my bed and watch Disney channel if they would let me get a few more ( hopefully) hours of sleep. That pacified them and I quickly went back to my zombie like state of sleep.
At 630am I was kindly startled awake by my little man yelling in my ear "I want some breakfast Mom!!" That is truly a joyous way to be awoken. Yeah.... right.
I quickly offered them a snack of bread.
[Ok lets backtrack a moment... in the week preceding this event, the kids had really started loving wheat bread as a snack. Just plain bread, no butter, jam, or peanut butter. They were really digging it.]
Ok, back to the story... I offered them each one piece of bread, knowing that in one of the bags were exactly two pieces left. Portion control- even half, well one-quarter awake, I was trying to be a good mom. There was also another brand new loaf of the cheap wheat bread in the back of the fridge ( you know, the kind that gives you 50 slices for 75 cents).
I sat up and told Jackson to get the bread out of the fridge and he and Jill could have the last two slices and to eat it in the kitchen only. He agreed and I listened to them scramble off down the hall to retrieve the bread.
Within minutes they were back on my bed, snuggled up watching the Wiggles. All was well.
So with that I was back to dreamland.

45 minutes later into my sleep of the dead, I rolled over and felt something, well, strange on my arm. Curious, I opened my eyes and observed that my entire mattress was lined with slices of bread. Bread, mind you, that was half eaten. Some had no crust, others had large bites taken out of the middle, and still others were ripped into pieces. You can imagine my delight at this glorious turn of events.

The culprits were like deer in headlights posted at the end of bed, caught in the act of ripping bread. I was not a happy mommy.
I rushed out of bed, yelling "What are you DOING?????" and finding as I made my way to the kitchen, more slices strewn on the counter top and the kitchen table.
Jackson and Jillian followed me down the hall saying "Mommy, we just Love bread! Sorry we made a mess!"
The bread fiends had found and opened the new loaf of bread in the fridge and left only 3 pieces in the bag. The remainder was strewn throughout the house.

So, I picked up, every piece and scrap of bread, placed them all in a Ziploc bag and announced... "If you want breakfast, your going to eat this bread. When you want a snack... its going to be bread. Lunch, Dinner- bread. You two are not going to eat anything else until the loaf of bread is gone."

And that is exactly what happened. They ate that whole bag of bread. They finally were able to eat other food about 630pm that night. Neither of them asked for bread until this past week. Funny how that happens.