Breakfast Cookies

Sometimes Skits likes oatmeal for breakfast- and making it for her makes me feel like a pretty good mom. When I was breastfeeding I lived on Irish steel cut oats- they were as close as I came to a craving and could be made in giant vats in those few moments when our new little charge was dozing in her blue bouncy chair. Once little Skits was able to eat solid food I started to share my oats with her, gently spiked with brown sugar and cinnamon. In the mornings before daycare I'd pack up her purple gruel- a pureed mix of berries, applesauce (or pearsauce), oats and yogurt- in little containers labeled by day of the week. If there wasn't time for the steel cut oats to simmer for 45 minutes in a milk and buttermilk bath, we'd pinch hit with Trader Joe's Quick-Cut Steel Cut Oats. These take only 8 minutes and can be made and cooled in less time than it takes her to watch an episode of Little Bear. She soon came to prefer this kind and dubbed it "Better Oatmeal." If we didn't have 8 minutes I'd pull out a plain microwavable packet and mix it up with milk, cinnamon and sugar and, after a few failed tries on account of texture, Skits learned to eat those too. Then came the day when we were out of plain oats and we didn't have the 8 minutes (plus cooling time) to make Better Oatmeal, so I grabbed one of Mommy's Maple and Brown Sugar packets, mixed it with milk and served it up to a very happy little customer.

So what about those days when I don't have 1 minute (plus cooling time)? Days when I've been up since 5:30 and I haven't yet eaten breakfast or showered off the sweat from the previous night's 2 hour workout and it's already 9 AM and I'm struggling to get Mr. White Rabbit/Mr. Yetti/Skits/Whatever-the-Heck-She's-Calling-Herself-Today out of her pajamas, into clean clothes, socks and shoes so I can take her to the nursery at the gym and fight crazy people for a bike in the 9:30 spin-- only to realize, as I'm strapping her into her carseat, that Skits needs a second breakfast? Those are the days when I've started to reach for Quaker Oatmeal Soft Cookies.

I mean... it SAYS Quaker Oatmeal right there on the front of the box. That's gotta count for something, right?? At least, that is precisely what I've been telling myself when I hand her a cookie at 8:45 in the morning. So today I decided to figure out where on the Bad Mama scale this was going to fall. Was this more of an "Opps, my kid's socks don't match today," or an, "I affix my kid to the couch with duct tape and turn on CNN so I can go out drinking with friends on a Wednesday night,"?

Here's what I found:

Made with milk (as I usually make her microwavable oatmeal), Quaker Oats Strawberry and Cream has

227 calories
67 calories from fat
16 mg of cholestrol
244 mg of sodium
20 grams of sugar
8 grams of protien
2 grams of fiber

One Cranberry and Yogurt Cookies, right out of the package has

170 calories
60 calories from fat
15 mg of cholestrol
140 mg of sodium
12 grams of sugar
2 grams of protien
4 grams of fiber

Suddenly feeling quite a bit better about that breakfast cookie now...