Back to the NaBloPoMo prompts today! This one is kind of lame, but hey…you get what you pay for!

Prompt for Monday, November 9:

What is the first thing you do every single day (I mean, after you hit the snooze button)? When did that step in your routine begin?

My alarm clock, usually, is our dog Junior:

He starts whining just about the time it starts getting light outside.  He doesn’t have a snooze function per se, but sometimes I can quiet him down for a few precious minutes by petting him, which I usually do while picking up my phone and squinting to see what ungodly time it is.

So I suppose technically the very first thing I do most mornings is pet the dog, which certainly isn’t a terrible way to start the day.

Dog-petting, pants-putting-on and stumbling to the bathroom aside, the first actual functional thing I do every day is either make breakfast or walk the dog.

If it’s my turn to walk the dog, that has to happen before anything else because the poor little thing has been holding it for like 12 hours and I feel horrible making him wait any longer than that.  Back before I lived with my husband I was the ONLY dog walker, so walkies always happened before breakfast no matter what.

If it’s not my turn to walk the dog, I’ll go downstairs and start breakfast.  I’ve always been a breakfast person, even when it was just cereal and milk as a kid.  I am mystified by people who can skip breakfast and still manage to function.  I think they might actually secretly be aliens, in fact.  It’s the only reasonable explanation.

Breakfast at our house is usually eggs, bacon or sausage of some description, some veggies, and tea.  Sometimes I go through phases of having steel-cut oats for breakfast (I make them savory, with cheese and black pepper and maybe an egg on top), but my husband is of the opinion that any meal that does not include meat is not actually a meal (and further, that eggs do not count as an adequate meat replacement no matter WHAT literally the rest of the world except maybe people who are allergic to eggs say), so even when I have oatmeal I end up cooking him eggs and meat anyway.