“Can I have mixed cereal?” My daughter asks.
“Yep, what kind?” I reply.
“Reese’s Puffs…”
“And…” I try to drag out the second cereal for the mix.
“Reese’s Puffs and…”
“How about Apple Jacks?”
“Yeah, Apple jacks.” She jumps up from the couch and heads to the kitchen.
This conversation is from a few days ago with my four year-old. Lately, my three older girls have started to eat mixed cereal. Simply put, mixing different kinds of cereals in the morning or at snack time.
My oldest daughter first asked for this about a month ago one morning as I was getting her cereal ready. When she asked, my first response was going to be, “No.” But before I said it, I wondered to myself why I was going to say no.
Time? It would take all of 20 seconds to open another box and pour it into the bowl. But life falls into routines, and a change in that routine makes us think about how it will affect our time. Every morning I say something like, “We got to go.” Trying to get the kids to hurry so that we stay “on time.” But time wasn’t a good enough reason.
It is odd. Who ever heard of mixing cereal… (let alone pop). I really caught myself on this idea. Was I really going to tell her no because it was different? But I started to wonder how many times did I do that. How many times do our kids get a knee jerk “NO” from us simply because it is different? I take certain sense of pride for thinking outside the box, but this moment challenged me. Showed me how fast we can react to an idea that is outside the (cereal) box and shut it down before we even consider it. How many ways to can we actually crush creativity?
Since I couldn’t think of a reason for her not to have mix cereal for breakfast, we started a trend in our home. It is a simple act, but a tasteful one.
It is all Connected 