Given everything else going on at breakfast, I was not looking for another variable. I had enough variables. I had a daughter who requires a specific half of a bagel and a son who has decided toast is a personal threat. I was not in an experimental mood.
But I’d been working on a pancake recipe, and at some point I made them and a miracle happened - everyone loved them, without debate.
I want to convey how unusual this is.
The pancakes are American-style, which I specify because we live in the Netherlands, and the Dutch pancake is a different object. Thinner. Larger. Often served with things that are not traditionally breakfast. I have nothing against it but it’s not what I grew up with, and apparently it’s not what my kids want either, because they identified the American version as correct almost immediately and I didn’t argue.
So, we used the pancakes as an incentive - eat the healthy breakfast, and you get dad’s amazing pancakes. This worked well, most of the time.
Then one morning my daughter ate one bite of her dippy egg and stopped.
She got one pancake. I started small, thumbnail-sized, technically a pancake but clearly a statement, mostly as a joke I had not fully thought through. She looked at it. Her eyes welled up with tears she was trying to hold back.
I told her it was a joke, pulled a silly face, and quickly made her a proper pancake. I was already at the pan, and in a moment of either instinct or desperation I made it in the shape of the first letter of her name.
She was delighted. Completely, immediately delighted, the way kids are when something exceeds their expectations so thoroughly they forget they were upset. My son witnessed this and demanded one with his initial. I made it. He was also delighted.
That was several months ago. We do this every weekend now. It is not a strategy I developed. It is something I stumbled into while trying to de-escalate a situation I had caused, and it has since become non-negotiable infrastructure. The kids treat it as a given. My son has started making requests. Last week he asked if I could do his whole name. I told him we needed a bigger pan. He’s still thinking about it.
The eggs rule holds. It mostly works. My daughter has started taking very small, deliberate bites and then looking at me the way someone looks at you when they think they’ve found a loophole. I’m pretending not to notice, because this is the one breakfast thing that works and I am not touching it.