When my son was smalll he loved those frozen sausage bisquits but they were way beyond my budget. I would buy can bisquits when they were on sale somtimes 10 cents a can and bake them all. And make tiny sausage patties to fit. Put them together and freeze in zipper bags. Pop them in the micro and go. He loved them and still does. Only difference now is he could eat a whole can or more of them!

It's really just a variation on the sausage biscuit / hot pockets idea, but I use scrambled eggs, crumbled bacon and shredded cheese to make breakfast burritos. I've been known to add chopped chicken from dinner, or even leftover chilli with the eggs. Freeze a dozen at a time in those snack-size ziplock bags and you can take one out and nuke it a minute on one side and 30 seconds on the other side and you have breakfast you can eat with one hand.

When my son was six and in first grade we lived in a very cold farmhouse in Wisconsin. The only cereal I might buy was oatmeal. Often his breakfast was homemade vegetable soup and cornbread on a cold morning. That made more sense to me than cereal from a box, or toast. The only snag? His class was having a unit on the importance of eating breakfast. I'm all for teaching kids about nutrition. The problem? His teacher has a chart with pictures of typical breakfast foods. Each child had a line on the chart, and could put a star sticker under the column with the type of foods he had that morning for breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, fruit, juice, milk…all the things one would normally associate with breakfast. He wasn't able to participate because there weren't any pictures of soup, or even carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, chicken, cornbread. Even though the soup was more nutritious than many of the other choices, it didn't fit on the chart. It was more important to me that he feel a part of his class than be isolated as the strange kid that ate soup for breakfast. For the two weeks of the nutrition lesson I served more traditional breakfasts. But I drew the line at boxes of sugary cold cereal or pop-tarts.

When the school had an event and the admission ticket was a box-top from General Mills cereals, we didn't go. General Mills had a program to give schools playground equipment in return for the boxtops collected. Right! You get an entire school to buy your cereal and you can afford to advertise by giving the school basketballs. I got a reputation as the strange woman from California who was always standing up for causes. His teacher begged that he be allowed to attend – she even provided the boxtops. I compromised – he got to go, but I refused to support General Mills. It was the principle of the thing. I might have even bought their cereal, but not when I was coerced to. I must have been a real challenge for my son to endure. I can look back and laugh now, but I wouldn't change a thing.