Or: A Breakfast Manifesto

Here's what you do:

Wake up in the morning, put on a comfy sweater, and make a pot of tea (or coffee if you're into that). Make yourself a light breakfast -- biscotti or a scone, toast with jam. Sit down, stare out a window, drink your hot beverage and eat your breakfast. If your neighbor does Tai Chi every morning in their backyard and your window overlooks their backyard, you have my permission to watch them do Tai Chi.

Eat your breakfast (this one and all following breakfasts) at your breakfast table in your breakfast area1. Use a cloth napkin and your best dishes.

Take a shower. Use nice-smelling soap. Put on a clean, soft bathrobe. I suggest slipper socks as well - the ones with little rubber dots on the bottom. Make another breakfast2. Maybe a poached egg, or slice of quiche. Brew a fresh pot of tea. Read the news or twitter or the next chapter in a book.

Change out of your bathrobe into pajamas. Wash your dishes and do something productive.

Make yourself breakfast -- I'd suggest fruit and yogurt with granola at this juncture, but follow your heart. Take this time to daydream about breakfasts you'd like to eat. Compile a grocery list.

Put something over your pajamas so they borderline pass as normal clothes and go to the grocery store. Buy ingredients indulgently.

Make another breakfast. French toast, waffles, pancakes, muffins, coffee cake, even cinnamon rolls if you have plenty of time.

Do some things, clean your kitchen, read a book. Switch to a tisane as it gets later in the day - something like rooibos or peppermint. Make a light breakfast if you get hungry. Grilled grapefruit, peaches and cinnamon, strawberries and black pepper.

Take a break and lie on the couch with your cat for a while.

Make yourself one last breakfast. Biscuits and gravy, a vegetable hash, frittata, maybe a breakfast burrito with avocado and black beans. This is the time for something hearty and savory.

Clean up, get ready for bed, change into fresh pajamas. Go to bed and read yourself to sleep.

In the morning, make yourself some breakfast.

[1] If, like I do, you live in a small apartment, you can still have a breakfast table and a breakfast area. I don't have a dining room and I sleep in a closet, but I do have a breakfast area.

[2] If you're the type of pedant who won't let go of linguistic prescriptivism and insists that breakfast is by definition the first meal of the day, all is not lost. Just go back to sleep after every meal and call it a new day.

