Easy Like Sunday Morning

If your family is anything like ours, then you understand what I mean when I say that we tend to spend our weekdays in survival mode. With two professional working parents and two young, wild hooligans running around, our weeks are crazy! Weeknights fly by in a haze of playtime, dinnertime, bathtime, bedtime.  By the time Friday rolls around, we have no idea where the week went or how we (once again) managed to get absolutely nothing accomplished. 

But weekends, on the other hand...oh, they are glorious! Weekends are when we disconnect and reconnect, spend quality time with the kids and maybe even get the lawn mowed or the laundry put away.  Magical times, I'm telling you.  Weekends are also our time to get out of the house and do fun activities with the kids. We take our weekends seriously and try to plan fun activities and adventures for us all, even if it's just hitting a local park or going for a family run.

Even better, my husband and I have a deal worked out where we each get one day on the weekend to sleep in (barring any unusual circumstances or scheduled events). On my husband's day to sleep in, I get up early with the kids and handle things until he moseys his way down to us.  I don't mind at all, but sometimes my three-year old has a near nervous breakdown when I walk in his bedroom in the morning and not daddy.  The best way I've found to talk him off the ledge is to promise to let him help me make breakfast...especially if it's a VERY special day when we get to have Pillsbury™ Grands! Cinnamon Rolls!  He jumps out of bed with a smile on his face that could light up a stadium!

I open the can for him, but he's surprisingly good at doing everything else.  He loves picking out the circle pan (working on shapes), counting out each cinnamon roll (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), arranging them in the pan and pressing the numbers on the kitchen timer (see, I even made it educational!).  By this time his baby sister is usually awake and ready to come down and play, so we have a quick dance party in the living room to the Paw Patrol theme song (don't judge, it's catchy!) while our house fills up with the smell of cinnamon goodness.  When the timer goes off, we all scream and run to the kitchen!

Because I'm incredibly trusting (or slightly insane), I let Mac put the icing on his cinnamon roll all by himself. He's a typical independent three-year old, so that made his day.  He was actually very careful and did a great job.  So, I let him add some sprinkles (because everything's better with sprinkles) and that was where it all went downhill.  I'll be cleaning sprinkles out of our tiles for the next six months. 

Mim was also a huge fan of the cinnamon rolls!  I didn't let her do her own icing or sprinkles (she can't be trusted), but she definitely enjoyed her cinnamon roll and licking all the sprinkles off her tray after she'd finished.  She kept smacking her lips, saying "Mmmm" and giving me the sign for "more."  Point taken, girlfriend.  They were a big hit and I score extra points for being such a fun mom. 

We finished our cinnamon rolls, mango, yogurt, eggs and milk (lots of coffee for mommy) and headed downstairs to play for a while before daddy woke up and finished off the remaining cinnamon rolls.  His wake-up signals "go time" and we spend the next hour in a mad dash of getting dressed, getting ready, getting packed and getting out the door so we can make the most of the day.  It's always stressful, always chaos, but always fun (ok, almost always). 

Our weekends look so different than they did a few short years ago.  Gone are the days of sleeping 'til noon, breakfast in bed or spending the day watching football on the couch.  Now our days are filled with changing diapers, catching crickets, wagon rides and chasing kites.  We dig in sandboxes, zoom down slides and ride bikes around the neighborhood.  I have to say, weekends now are way more fun.  They're full of memories and magic. All you have to do is add icing and sprinkles...

What do your weekend mornings look like?

*This post was sponsored by General Mills through their partnership with POPSUGAR Select. While I was compensated to write a post about Pillsbury™ Grands! Cinnamon Rolls, all opinions are my own.