Bacon

This morning I prepared breakfast for 8 kids. Now, you should know I don't "do" breakfast, per se. For one thing, I'm not a big fan of the usual breakfast foods - bacon, eggs, pancakes. The perfect breakfast for me is a coffee from Starbucks and some type of pastry! Yum! But since I cannot indulge that craving every day, I normally have some sort of appropriately "grown up" high-fiber, low cholesteral cereal. Either way, it's simple, and quick. And I can fix it myself, for myself and no one bugs me. That's how I like breakfast. But today I decided to be the good mom and whip up a traditional breakfast, waking the children with the wafting smells of bacon (stop laughing, it really happened!). But I don't understand bacon. For one thing, here is a food that is bad for you on all accounts. You remove it from it's package and separate the greasy, slimy slices which you then lay in a hot skillet. The bacon pops and sputters and shrinks to about 50% of it's size (if you've chosen a good package that is mostly "meat stripes" instead of "fat stripes"). Whilst this is happening, tiny projectiles of hot bacon grease shoot from the pan and hit you in the most amazing places - eyelid, forearm, and that delicate skin on your chest (which some like to refer to as decollete or something like that but I don't even know how to say it, much less spell it, so whatever). Anyway, I don't understand preparing a food that is so bad for you, actually injures you, and then ends up being smaller than it started out to be, forcing you to eat six or seven slices (not me, of course, I only had half a slice - cholesteral, you know!). Breakfast is just too much WORK and the last thing I want in the morning is to spend an hour at a hot stove and come away with a virtual dot-to-dot of bacon grease burns on my chest. I'm all about the assortment of cereals and carton of milk. Who can complain when there's Cocoa Puffs, Fruit Loops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and that veritable favorite (and, in my opinion, heaven in a box) Lucky Charms? Pour the cereal, pour the milk and eat. Simple. Clean. And injury-free.