Most weekdays I eat breakfast with my kids. But, during the week, I’m rushed at breakfast time. This block of time is not only reserved for eating, but also for putting the finishing touches on school lunches, reminding kids to brush their teeth, rounding up books, coats, shoes, signing assignment notebooks, and helping finish the last few “forgotten” math homework problems. It is a rushed experience. We don’t speak much, our weekday breakfasts are, for lack of a better term, “utilitarian.”
The weekends are a different story. Weekend breakfast is a whole family ordeal that involves eggs, homemade waffles or pancakes and lots of bacon. We sit around and talk for a while, usually about what we want to do that day. What starts off as a whole-family discussion, quickly turns into a monologue by First Born. Maybe it goes back to the birth order chart, but our oldest cannot be part of a discussion without taking over entirely. My wife and I have lovingly started to call it “The Breakfast Filibuster.”
What may start off as a conversation about family bike rides and trips to the park soon turns to what First Born wants for Christmas, or a list of her best friends, or her favorite school lunches, or all of us being reminded for the ten-thousandth time that she once stayed up until 2am, but her brother and sister DIDN”T GET TO DO THAT! It’s exhausting just listening to it all.
Unlike the government, no supermajority can defeat a filibuster, there’s no way to block it, you just sit there and wait it out.
-Pete
