Breakfast Update: I am so in love with chocolate milk right now.

I realized recently that I could drink it for calcium rather than regular milk (which I really do not enjoy drinking at all). So most days when I get to work I have an 8-ounce carton of the stuff. Up until now I've gotten most of my calcium from cheese, calcium-added orange juice, and cereal with 1% milk (which I can eat on cereal, but can't stand to drink).*

So this morning I am having chocolate milk, a blueberry muffin, and a tiny banana. Even more than chocolate milk, I love itty bitty bananas. Not those mini ones, but just very small regular bananas. Yum!

It always makes me laugh when people are snooty about journals where people write about what they had for breakfast, because I am fascinated by what other people have for breakfast. I love it. I wish every online journaler would write an entry on What I Like Best for Breakfast, and Why. I've already done mine.

* My aversion to drinking straight milk comes from attending grammar school in England. First of all, the milk we drank was pasteurized but not homogonized. That meant the cream wasn't blended back into the milk, so it all rose up to the top of the bottle. So you'd have a half-inch layer of thick cream on top of very thin milk. Like any good American mom, my mom always bought homogenized milk ("red top" milk, named for the red foil top on the bottle), so I never had to drink the nasty pasteurized milk at home.

At school it was a different story. Around 10:00 in the morning, someone from the cafeteria would bring a crate of little milk bottles into the classroom and leave them at the front for our milk break. Sometimes we'd stop right away, when the milk was still kind of cool (I'm not sure it was actually refrigerated), but sometimes we'd keep working for awhile and not get to the milk until it was starting to get a little warm. To drink the milk they gave us these little tiny straws to stick through the silver foil lids.

Those little 8-oz bottles of milk seemed like half-gallons to me. There is really nothing more disgusting than lukewarm milk with thick blobs of cream that get stuck in your little kiddie-size straw. Then when you finally manage to choke it down, you get all phlegmy and milk-breathed. I would usually try to stick my straw back as far in my mouth as possible without gagging myself so that I could drink the stuff without tasting it. Even so, I hardly ever managed to finish it. Everyone else slurped it down without a problem. Sometimes the teacher would save my bottle and try to make me drink it in the afternoon. Can you imagine? After it sat in a classroom for 4 hours?

So I am pretty pleased with myself for being able to drink milk of any description.