Now that the kids in our house are well into their school-morning routines, it reminds me of how different they are when it comes to breakfast. According to nutritionists, it is the most important meal of the day. Around our place, it is certainly the most varied from child to child. I know that on Larry's Page, here at TheKansasCityChannel.com, Larry Moore has his famous pancake recipe available. He talks of the wonderful Saturday mornings spent making the delicious stuff for the whole family. For our family, however, breakfast is the only solitary meal of the day. (Also, I can't make pancakes and I'm not as good a father as Larry.) The fact is that, in the mornings, each person is on their own schedule and so the menu becomes very idiosyncratic. Wow! That's big word. This could almost be an NPR blog!

Let's take them one at a time:

Alexander, age 17, will take time for a bowl of whatever cereal is handy no matter what else is happening. If he is due at school by 7:45 a.m., and it's 7:43, he will pour a Jethro Bodine-size bowl and chow down. He leaves the milk out, in case he needs an emergency refill, and cereal out while he eats, because he loves to read the box. If they offer Rhodes Scholarships based on how much riboflavin is in a serving of Wheaties or how to get Cap'n Crunch through the maze and safely back to his ship, this young man should start packing for Oxford now.

The next boy, Taylor, loves the toaster. When I was a kid, I don't remember ever having to replace the toaster. In Taylor's nearly 16 years of breakfasts, we've gone through what seems like 8o of them. Pop-tarts, Eggos, toastable pancakes (sorry, Larry), French Toastables which he calls Freedom Toastables, bagels, bread...you name it and he will toast it. He likes his stuff well-done...everything is Cajun style when it pops up. There are times we've had to refer to dental records in order to determine if the result was toast or a bagel or a waffle. The upside of Taylor's love of all things burnt, is that we know our smoke alarms work. Like the guitar player in Spinal Tap, Taylor would love to add an 11 to the darkness knob. If his mother catches him about to eat the charred remains of a once recognizable breakfast, she will scrape the top layer of ash off into the sink. Once we thought we saw the faint visage of Art Garfunkle in the sink, but we couldn't convince anyone to make pilgrimages to view it, so we washed it down the in-sink-erator.

Samantha is not a big morning person. She doesn't really like to eat traditional breakfast foods. However, if she can have something like rice with a bunch of vegetables and spices thrown in, a sleeve of saltine crackers and a strawberry smoothie, she will eat...and eat...and eat. Somewhere out there, there are future college roomies who will never know what to expect when they open the dorm mini-fridge. It must be good fuel for her as she doesn't really stop moving, talking, laughing, running, dancing the rest of the day.

Our youngest, Harrison, is pretty open to any menu for breakfast. He will eat an omelet or cereal or toast...all without complaint. However, he does insist on having the television on The History Channel. Something about grainy black and white footage helps his digestion. We had to curtail the viewing and eating combo for a time when he started calling his mother Field Marshall Rommel and telling me to ignore the ticking brief case he kept sliding under my chair.

Speaking of my lovely wife, she believes in a very healthy breakfast. There's so much fruit piled up in her bowl it looks like Carmen Miranda is trying to resurface after a diving mission. She doesn't go in for the brightly-colored, highly-sugared cereals. Her choices have unpronounceable names like Murpenflaka or Nutsberriestwigsandleaves. She never has to worry about the rest of us stealing her breakfast foods.

As a baby, I'm told, like a lot of little ones, I liked Cheerios. Then, as I got a little older, my breakfast was usually toast with peanut butter and a class of chocolate milk. In college, I usually grabbed a handful of Oreos on my way out the door. Truly, the breakfast of champions. Today, having come full circle, and circles, I am back to Cheerios. Every night I pour some into a plastic container which I grab at 2:30 in the morning as I head to work. I eat them, dry, on the way to the station. If that sounds kind of pathetic, don't worry. I also surprise myself by throwing in two dark chocolate Dove candies. I do this because my mom says dark chocolate is good for my blood pressure and because the wrappers have inspirational messages inside like "Go to your special place" and "Smile more today." This was all well and good until this morning. I ate the chocolate and checked out the wrapper which said "Maybe you should try eating a better breakfast and knock off the sweets, tubby."