Cooking Tuesday - a little prep the night before

I'm always tired at night when we're doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen.  The last thing I want to do is think about breakfast.  But since we get up at the crack of dawn (or most of the year while it's still dark, so that my littlest daughter wants to ask "Why do we get up at night and go to bed in the morning?") and my eyes are so full of sleep that everything seems huge. 

I'm not perfect.  In fact I'm super far from being a perfectionist.  Have you ever read the blog "A Slob Comes Clean"?  I can pretty much relate.  Have you heard me say before, I love to organize, but hate to keep it up? 

So I will tell you what my goals are, and let me tell you with two teen-agers and one half-a-year away from being a teenager, my goals are totally attainable.  I just need to put them to work.

Come dishes time two of my older three will always show up (they're all supposed to, but most of them hope they can get away with skipping out) and a couple of the younger ones show up.  But basically all my children are old enough to dry, and clear the table and wipe it off.  Not all of them can handle the sweeping or the cooking. 

So what I need to do is, while I am washing the dishes.  Give those two who are so faithful a better job.   They've been faithful with the little, yucky jobs, now they can have something better.  Not saying that making coffee or getting breakfast prep is their favorite thing in all the world, but I am saying, they like it better than drying.

When I wake up in the morning and I have to measure ingredients for pancakes or cook a batch of rice (for our cereal: rice, sugar and milk), it seems to take forever.  But when I wake up in the morning and the coffee is hot and already brewing, and all I have to do is pour the dry ingredients in with the wet ones.  Voila' - pancakes in a few minutes, folks.

We don't put out our tableware that early because you never know what the cat will do.  He's good about not eating stuff off the counter, but the table is a great look-out for all those birds flying around during the day.   I have stacked the plates on the kitchen counter with a towel over them. 

It takes two seconds the night before when I'm wide awake and things are going well.  It only takes two seconds in the morning as well, but I'm bleary-eyed and sleepy and feel like everything is a huge chore.  I bounce a little more in the morning when I can wake up and all those "chores" to do.

Keep pressing on.
Steph